Editor’s note: We remember President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a leader who took the reins of office in the depths of the Great Depression and, in a record-setting span of nearly four terms in office, steered a course back to prosperity. But few of us are aware just how much we owe FDR for his crusading efforts to save and improve America’s forests. “Think 3 billion trees planted, crucial landscapes saved, from the Okefenokee Swamp to the Olympic Mountains — and more acreage conserved than the size of California,” writes historian Nigel Hamilton.

Growing up in Hyde Park, New York, on a 600-acre family farm, FDR had learned at an early age how to manage land. When his father died while the future president was at Harvard, he took over the farm. “It was the beginning of FDR’s lifelong obsession with trees and the importance of trees to the environment,” Hamilton writes.

Just days after his inauguration, Roosevelt ordered that thousands of trees be planted in Hyde Park, New York.

That FDR, with the crushing weight of the Great Depression on his shoulders, found time for planting trees was tangible proof of his long-held conservationist convictions. “Forests, like people, must be constantly productive,” Roosevelt told the Forestry News Digest. “The problems of the future of both are interlocked. American forestry efforts must be consolidated, and advanced.” To that end he wanted to use forests to ease the economic crisis at hand.

On March 14, 1933, Roosevelt issued a memorandum for the secretaries of war, the interior, labor, and agriculture. “I am asking you to constitute yourselves an informal committee of the Cabinet to coordinate the plans for the proposed Civilian Conservation Corps [CCC]. These plans include the necessity of checking up on all kinds of suggestions that are coming in relating to public works of various kinds. I suggest that the Secretary of the Interior act as a kind of clearing house to digest the suggestions and to discuss them with the other three members of this informal committee.”

From inauguration day forward, Roosevelt ably projected the image of an open-hearted liberal who cared mightily about the downtrodden, struggling families, and the homeless.

FDR convened the first meeting of the quartet of Cabinet members that March. The team was composed of George Dern, from War; Henry A. Wallace, from Agriculture; Harold Ickes, from Interior; and Frances Perkins, from Labor. During the meeting, Roosevelt nonchalantly sketched, on a scrap of paper, a flowchart of the CCC chain of command. As Perkins later explained, Roosevelt “put the dynamite” under his Cabinet members and let them “fumble for their own methods.” Roosevelt envisioned three types of camps: forestry (concentrated in national forest sites); soil (dedicated to combating erosion and implementing other soil conservation measures); and recreational (focused on developing parks and other scenic areas). From the get-go, Ickes was the New Deal’s taskmaster, with the impatience of a drill sergeant. In a symbolic gesture, Ickes ordered the doors to the Interior headquarters locked every morning at 9:01. Showing up late for work, by even a few minutes, meant instant dismissal. Throughout Roosevelt’s first term, Ickes promoted state and national parks with pluck and vigor, rebuffing right-wing senators who claimed the CCC was a Bolshevist threat to democracy.

Frances Perkins — the first female Cabinet officer in U.S. history and one of only two Cabinet secretaries to work for the entirety of Roosevelt’s tenure in the White House (the other being Ickes) — was tasked with coordinating the recruitment and selection of able-bodied CCC enrollees. Initially a quarter of a million unemployed, unmarried “boys” or juniors between ages 18 and 23 (later expanded to 28) were sought. The pool was later widened to include 25,000 veterans of World War I who had fallen on hard times; 25,000 “Local Experienced Men” (LEM) who worked as project leaders in the junior camps; 10,000 Native Americans, who would be assigned to improve reservations; and 5,000 residents of the territories of Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Perkins worried that Roosevelt was biting off more than he could chew. However, as the trees got planted, she soon became a believer.

What made the CCC more than just a dazzling work-relief program was the professional expertise the LEM brought to land reclamation. Skilled young physicians, architects, biologists, teachers, climatologists, and naturalists learned about conservation in a tangible, hands-on way. If not for the Great Depression, these workers would have found themselves engaged in upwardly mobile jobs. But by a twist of fate, as many of their diaries and letters home make clear, these LEM were indoctrinated in New Deal land stewardship principles. Later in life, after World War II, many became environmental warriors, challenging developers who polluted aquifers and unregulated factories that befouled the air.

Having developed a working model for the CCC, Roosevelt delivered his plea to launch it with the passage of the Emergency Conservation Work Act, which would provide the authority to create, by statute, a “tree army” to provide employment (plus vocational training) and conserve and develop “the natural resources of the United States.” He sent his bill to Congress on March 21. Roosevelt made it very clear that reforestation projects wouldn’t interfere with “normal employment.” In a message to Congress, Roosevelt stated in part:

I propose to create a Civilian Conservation Corps to be used in simple work, not interfering with normal employment, and confining itself to forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood control, and similar projects. …

More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work. The overwhelming majority of unemployed Americans, who are now walking the streets and receiving private or public relief, would infinitely prefer to work. We can take a vast army of these unemployed out into healthful surroundings. We can eliminate to some extent at least the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual and moral stability.

Roosevelt did a marvelous job of selling the CCC, answering congressmen’s questions forcefully but politely. At six press conferences, he invoked public works and the CCC. After a round of debate, the 73rd Congress passed S. 598, Public Law No. 5 on March 31, creating the CCC as a temporary emergency work-relief program. Roosevelt’s unstated hope was that what the New Republic called his “tree army” would eventually become a permanent agency.

Roosevelt hired American Federation of Labor leader Robert Fechner as the first director of the CCC. Originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Fechner, born in poverty, left school at age 16 and moved to Georgia to become a “candy butcher” on trains. Mild-mannered and collaborative by nature, Fechner was an intrepid labor reformer. Because of his sterling reputation for fairness — as well as his union background — he proved an inspired choice.

By mid-April, the program was coming to life. According to Roosevelt’s estimation, an 11-man CCC crew could, weather permitting, plant 5,000 to 6,000 trees per day. Surrounded by maps of America, the president studied rivers and streams, deserts and forestlands. “I want,” Roosevelt declared, “to personally check the location and scope of the camps.”

Roosevelt’s “tree army” became a legend from the start, and he became a forester-in-chief hero to many conservation groups. As historian David M. Kennedy noted, the public quickly understood that Roosevelt had a “lover’s passion” for trees.

All over America, CCC tent cities popped up like Boy Scout camps; they were soon replaced with rustic barracks. Each company unit of 200 CCC “boys” was a temporary village in itself. All sorts of bylaws, pledges, and rules of engagement were announced. The “CCCers” received three full meals each day and were issued olive-drab uniforms, which included pants, a shirt, gloves, two pairs of underwear, a canteen, and a pair of heavy, steel­-toed boots. In time, Roosevelt and Fechner changed the uniform to a spruce-green color for the coat, pants, overseas cap, and mackinaw (the shirt remained olive). “The issuance of a new uniform distinctive from other governmental services will improve the appearance of the corps,” Fechner noted. “It will also aid in building up and maintaining high morale in the camps.”

Unlike the army, there were no guard houses, drills, saluting, or court-martials. But morale was important from 6 a.m. reveille to taps at 10 p.m. At just $30 per month, these young men weren’t going to get rich: $22 to $25 of their pay was mandated to be sent home to their families; what remained was spent at the canteen, on haircuts and snacks, or at the local nickelodeon. Topnotchers were able to boost their salary by becoming technicians. A gag circulated among new enrollees — “Another day, another dollar; a million days, I’ll be a millionaire.”

Uniformed enrollees started working at a breakneck pace to plant millions of trees, restore grass, build check dams, practice rodent control and kill invasive or destructive animals, prevent wildfires, and teach bankrupt farmers how to form soil conservation districts. Particularly concerned about California’s forests — which drought and arid conditions had made hyper-vulnerable to fire — Roosevelt instructed CCC crews to cut a 600-mile Ponderosa Way firebreak along the base of the Sierra Nevada in California, the longest such protective barrier in the nation. The CCC “boys” were also dispatched to do immediate battle in the drought-ravaged Great Plains and the soil­-stricken American South. Even Puerto Rico had CCC camps, employing 2,400 men.

Roosevelt never meant the CCC to be a panacea for the systemic woes of the Great Depression, but it did save a vast number of young men from homelessness or, even worse, hopelessness. Roosevelt viewed his “boys” not merely as temporary relief workers, but as makers of a permanent, greener new America. Bursting with optimism, he believed the work-relief experience would transform the young recruits intellectually as well as physically. Teamwork and citizenship and conservation would all be learned in the CCC. Only 37 days after Roosevelt took office, the first CCC enrollee — Henry Rich of Virginia — was dispatched to Camp Roosevelt near Luray, Virginia, located in the 649,500-acre George Washington National Forest, the first camp to open. Six additional CCC camps soon followed in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, employing nearly a thousand men to thin overcrowded stands, remove dead chestnut trees, plant saplings, install water systems, build overlooks, and lay stone walls. Between 1933 and 1938, owing to New Deal care, state park acreage in America increased by 70 percent. When FDR became president, Virginia had only two state parks. Determined to rectify the recreation crisis, Roosevelt sent 107,000 CCC enrollees into the state, and within three years, six more parks would open.

Forest grunts: Civilian Conservation Corps workers clear brush and plant seedlings in an area of Idaho’s Saint Joe National Forest damaged by fire.Courtesy of The National Archives and Records Administration

Although the CCC actually started in Virginia, it was the trans-Mississippi West that the “boys” quickly occupied like an invading army. In the early and mid-1930s, perhaps the most notable CCC infrastructure work in the West was in Colorado, a state ideally suited for a youth corps. Only five states exceeded Colorado’s native forest acreage. Meanwhile, unemployment was at 25 percent. So in the summer of 1933, 29 CCC camps were established.

Many CCC recruits lived in the gateway town of Estes Park and rode red tourist buses (called “woodpeckers” by locals) up to the construction sites. It took six CCC companies, working on a dozen mountain peaks, to help turn FDR’s “Top of the World” road into a 48-mile reality. “A few months ago I was broke,” Charles Bartell Loomis wrote in Liberty magazine in 1934. “At this writing I am sitting on top of the world. Almost literally so, because National Park No. 1 CCC Camp near Estes Park … is 9,000 feet up. Instead of holding down a park bench or pounding the pavements looking for work, today I have work, plenty of good food, and a view of the sort that people pay money to see.”

In the state of New York, enlistment in the CCC began on April 7 and 8 with 1,800 young unemployed men, all carrying welfare agency certificates, showing up at the Army Building at 39 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan. Cheers and renditions of “Happy Days Are Here Again” were heard. From the Wall Street area, these initial New York City recruits were bused to Fort Slocum in Westchester County, Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, and a segregated African-American CCC camp at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

Roosevelt ordered that half of New York’s 66 CCC camps were to be based in state parks. Four innovative New York CCC camps were erected on private land with the cooperation of the owners. Throughout the Adirondacks were numerous old dams, once installed for logging purposes but now collapsed, leaving flats overrun with sumps and bog vegetation. The CCC, by improving these old dams or building new ones, created nine new lakes.

Pennsylvania boasted the second-highest number of CCC camps of any state, trailing only California. Federally funded historical restoration projects took place at Fort Necessity and Valley Forge. Thirty-seven new fire observation towers were erected in state parks. Ickes, an ardent supporter of the NAACP, dispatched an African-American CCC company (led by black military officers) to landscape and renovate Gettysburg National Military Park with the hope that the experience would foster pride in the unit.

What Roosevelt hoped to do by employing youths, whether rural or urban, was to reduce juvenile delinquency. The New Republic went so far as to editorialize that the CCC was Roosevelt’s way to “prevent the nation’s male youth from becoming semi-criminal hitchhikers.” Education was a key component of the camps. Once the young men were officially enrolled, they would take classes in Forestry, Soil Conservation, and Conservation of Natural Resources. CCCers were further required only to do calisthenics, polish their shoes, brush their teeth clean, and maintain a sense of humor.

From inauguration day forward, Roosevelt ably projected the image of an open-hearted liberal who cared mightily about the downtrodden, struggling families, and the homeless. Increasing the size and scope of the federal government to alleviate suffering blindsided the GOP opposition. The CCC was part of this expansion. The public response was so favorable to the CCC that on October 1, 1933, Roosevelt instituted a second period of enrollment. Three months later, 300,000 CCCers were serving America. In 1935, Congress renewed the program, allowing participation to be over 350,000.

CCCers could initially sign up for only six-month stints. Later they could re-up for a total of 18 months, but after that time expired they had to leave the CCC for six months before they could reenlist.

“Instead of holding down a park bench or pounding the pavements looking for work, today I have work, plenty of good food, and a view of the sort that people pay money to see.” —CCC worker Charles Bartell Loomis

When CCC acceptance letters arrived by mail or telegram or even word of mouth in Missouri, whoops and celebrations usually occurred. While there is no proper documentation of how precisely the CCC office in St. Louis selected the first 25,000 men from Missouri, a distinctive pattern emerged. Most Missouri CCCers were skinny as a rail, Caucasian, averaging an eighth-grade education, and lacking meaningful work experience. After passing a strict physical evaluation and receiving vaccinations, they were clay ready to be molded.

Within a year, over 4,000 CCCers, directed by the National Park Service, fanned out in 22 CCC camps and worked in 15 Missouri state parks, the majority in the Ozarks. A total of 342 examples of “rustic architecture” erected in these state parks by the CCC have been listed in the National Register of Historic Places as of 2015 — an astounding testimonial to the craftsmanship of the CCCers.

Tainting this fine record of achievement in Missouri, however, was the institutionalization of racial prejudice. Although Roosevelt had originally considered integrating the CCC, the program wasn’t sold to Congress as a civil rights crusade. Nor did he want to offend his Democratic political base in the South — which had been instrumental in his election — by attacking Jim Crow. Early on, the CCC created separate companies for African-American enrollees; 250,000 blacks enrolled in 150 “all-Negro” CCC companies throughout the nation from 1933 to 1942. The president’s uninspired “separate but equal” principle regarding the CCC infuriated civil rights groups.

Each Missouri camp had a company commander, a project superintendent, and an educational adviser. There were also chaplains, doctors, silviculturists (tree experts), agronomists, and engineers. At bugle call, the enrollees made their beds and scrubbed the barracks under the watchful eye of an Army foreman. Because the CCC had certain practices in common with the U.S. Army, it isn’t surprising that many military leaders, after initial skepticism, appreciated the CCC. Reserve officers were often in charge of a camp’s transportation needs, day-to-day management, and operational regulations. Part of the attraction of the CCC for many men was the seductive promise of three meals a day. Once the orange juice was downed and plates of eggs and sausage were consumed, the shovel-ax brigade climbed into the pickup trucks that drove them to work sites. At some sites, CCCers drove giant bulldozers and concrete mixers and wielded hydraulic rock-busters and electric saws. It’s been said that the CCC recruits in Missouri were more likely to stink of gasoline than smell of pine.

Not long after the CCC was established, the mushrooming camps each launched their own newspapers or mimeographed newsletters to chronicle daily life. Roosevelt asked Melvin Ryder — who had served on the staff of Stars and Stripes during World War I — to publish from Washington a nationally distributed weekly newspaper, Happy Days, which would feature propagandistic pieces on life in the CCC camps, sporting events, entertainment, and developments in conservation education. Happy Days sometimes printed entries for the best CCC motto. Many were funny, such as “They Came, They Saw(ed), They Conquered,” or bittersweet: “Farewell to Alms.” The New York Daily News approvingly quoted from Happy Days that the CCC motto was “They’ve Made the Good Earth Better.”
Even though the CCC was dissolved in 1942, the work of the “boys” remains visible from coast to coast. Over the course of its nine-year existence, the CCC conserved more than 118 million acres of national resources throughout America — more acreage than all of California. As the plaque at the School of Conservation in Branchville, New Jersey, reads: “These men participated in the world’s most famous conservation program. America will never be able to repay them. All that is great and good about conservation we owe to the CCC.”

From the Archive

Post Editorials Supported the CCC

The Post’s editorial board generally hewed to a conservative line. But when it came to the CCC, a program many on the right vilified as a socialist initiative, our support was wholehearted.

Better Than Welfare

All manner of schemes have been tried and very large sums have been spent for unemployment relief during the past three years. But no attack upon unemployment yet attempted has in it a greater element of hope and inspiration than the emergency conservation work of the Federal Government. This gives 250,000 men the opportunity of working for six months this summer in the nation’s parks and forests in return for food, clothing, medical attention, shelter and $30 a month, most of which the workers are expected to allot to their families at home.

Great numbers of young men have felt themselves a burden upon their families. Relief efforts in general have been directed to the unemployed married worker with dependents; the unmarried young men have been, until now, largely neglected. The forest camp work is aimed at these youths; its purpose is to redeem them from incipient social rebellion, to raise their depressed morale, to build up their health, to help their families with the allotments sent home, and incidentally to accomplish needed work in the forests and parks.

These young men will put in their six months under wholesome and uplifting conditions. They cannot fail to be better citizens for having spent that length of time in constructive manual labor in forests and parks. Nor can they fail to receive new hope and strength. After all, it is dreary business just to feed people and leave them in idleness. Details may prove thorny, but the idea is definitely promising and the attack upon the problem of idle youth is strategic and direct.

—“Hope for Young Men,” Editorial, June 17, 1933

Self-Respect, Confidence, and Fortitude

How might morality be strengthened in the individual? Above all, by strengthening courage; therefore, proximately, by developing hardiness and health; a fit and ready body is a sturdy prop to self-respect, confidence and fortitude. How admirable it would be if the Civilian Conservation Corps would raise its remuneration, widen its purposes, and draw every American youth for a year into its character-forming discipline, its wholesome friendship with forest, stream and sky!

—“Our Morals,” by Will Durant, January 26, 1935

Some Mistakes Were Made

Recent admissions that political influence has been a factor in selecting part of the CCC personnel are exceedingly distasteful to large numbers of fair-minded and unprejudiced people. … Surely, in the hasty finding of work projects for nearly half a million young men, it is more than likely that some mistakes were made. But the idea of putting hundreds of thousands of otherwise idle youths into wholesome outdoor work amid healthful and often beautiful and inspiring surroundings has appealed to everybody.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/07/11/history/post-perspective/forester-in-chief.html/feed1Overseeing the National Park Service Is No Picnichttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/04/28/history/post-perspective/overseeing-national-park-service-no-picnic.html
Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:30:19 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=115538In 1954, Conrad Wirth, the director of the National Park Service, was responsible for 24 million acres of properties and the myriad troubles that came with them. Today, NPS sites cover an area larger than New Mexico, and the problems keep coming.

]]>In 1954, 3,600 employees administered and cared for the National Park Service’s 24 million acres of property for the benefit if their 46 million tourists. These were some pretty big numbers, and with those numbers came some pretty big headaches, from the difficulties of conservation and preservation efforts to the problem of poachers, smugglers, and vandals.

The person ultimately responsible for dealing with that sea of troubles, as well as for convincing Congress to find the budget for it, is the director of the NPS. It takes a special breed of person to step into such a multifarious role, for the director of the NPS is at once a conservationist, a proprietor, a historian, a businessperson, a custodian, and even the chief of a small force of traffic cops.

In 1954, that man was Conrad Wirth.

That year, Post writer Robert M. Yoder wrote the following profile of Director Wirth, “Twenty-four Million Acres of Trouble,” bringing to light the challenges he faced and the aplomb with which he juggled the many components of his position.

The troubles of the NPS have not waned in the past 60 years. If anything, they have grown as the park system itself has grown. Today, over 300 million guests visit the NPS’s more than 400 properties — so much more than just the 59 national parks — including battlefields, monuments and memorials, seashores, lakeshores, rivers, parkways, trails, and other historic sites. All told, today’s NPS bears responsibility for 84 million acres of land — an area larger than New Mexico — in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.

The NPS’s duties at these sites are as varied as the properties themselves: 22,000 professionals and 221,000 volunteers protect wildlife, rescue hikers, maintain cabins, preserve historic buildings, manage traffic, prevent and repair vandalism, watch for forest fires, and so much more. Why? To protect the most beautiful parts of our country. To preserve our history and our legacy. To provide us all with access to hardy education and recreation. To ensure that future generations can learn and enjoy as we have.

And to make sure that the next time you visit an NPS site, it is a walk in the park.

Twenty-Four Million Acres of Trouble

As Conrad L. Wirth hikes down a corridor of the Department of the Interior in Washington, or sits at lunch in the Cosmos Club, a passing friend sometimes sings out, “Hi-ya, Connie. How are things?” Wirth is manager of a 24,000,000-acre domain which can grow problems the way Indiana can grow corn, and there must be days when he is tempted to answer this question. Even a partial account could be a little striking.

“Why, about normal,” Wirth might say. “We’re having a little trouble with crocodiles, mountain climbers, wild burros, moonshiners, poachers and smugglers, of course. There’s some question what to do with maybe five or six thousand surplus elk, and it’s going to be a fight to preserve the land-loving goose. The high cost of caves is something of a headache, and I wish we could figure out how to keep the sea cows from hanging around the business district — that’s in Miami. There are seven kinds of beetles attacking seven kinds of timber, the prehistoric ruins need some work done, and we had a complaint from a man who says that in the forest primeval there is no place to plug in his electric razor. … How are things with you?”

A husky 200-pounder in his early 50s, Wirth looks well-built to withstand work and worry, and providence keeps him beautifully supplied with both. There are men who can go to the closet of a morning and select any of 100 suits, quiet, loud, blue, brown, gray, single-breasted or double, pinstripe, check, herringbone or plaid. Wirth has a collection of problems far more extensive, far more varied.

They are perquisites of his job, clearly one of the most remarkable in the world. Wirth is director of the National Park Service, boss of our 180 national parks, monuments, historic sites, and recreation areas.

This means administering $4,000,000,000 worth of the grandest and most peculiar real estate under our flag, including glaciers, volcanoes, geysers, deserts, giant sequoias 3,500 years old, great caves, and petrified forests. It is not true, as Jim Bridger reported, that there are petrified birds singing petrified songs, but the wildlife that Wirth is charged with preserving includes some minnows native, of all places, to the desert of Death Valley.

So a multitude of plain and exotic troubles is to be expected. This is a condition so natural, in fact, that without them, Wirth probably would suffer some form of the bends, like a diver brought up too suddenly from the deep. Trouble is the park director’s element, as water is the natural element of fish — he is running out of fish — or woods the natural element of skunks, which are driving picnickers away from tables and campers out of their tents.

Wirth’s paramount problem is money; he is in a financial hole of real grandeur. The parks are running down and getting harder use, by more millions, every year. “The people,” one park man says, “are wearing out the scenery.” To get what Wirth needs will require a small miracle of salesmanship; meanwhile, he needs money so badly that it is a wonder he didn’t accept the Crater Lake offer.

Crater Lake, in Oregon, is one of the great sights of the world. The lake is blue beyond description; and you look down on it from walls of rock falling 500 to 2,000 feet. One enterprising Westerner saw an opportunity here. Thousands come every year to stand on this rim, and the sight, the gentleman figured, must strike deep into the soul, arousing an impulse he planned to satisfy. “Here’s this beautiful lake, way down there,” he wrote. “You rent me a spot on the rim, and I’ll set up a concession where, for two bits or maybe 50 cents, people can drop rocks into it.”

There was another sound suggestion for making money, though it comes a little late. A farmer visited Yellowstone in time to see Old Faithful erupt, with that reliability which makes it one of the two or three most famous sights in the land.

“Ranger,” the farmer said, “you got something there. Why, people would come from all around, just to see that geyser, if you’d advertise it.”

Whatever your problem, Wirth’s got one to match. Does your dog nip the garbage man? Wirth’s got bears which nip tourists, sometimes bringing on lawsuits — one, which the government won, for $75,000. Got aphids on the roses? It will be consoling to consider Wirth’s pest problems: on a day no worse than usual they will include beetles, tent caterpillars, webworms, loopers, sawflies, and wood ticks. His oddest gardening worry is preserving a Hawaiian plant so excessively rare that there are only two known specimens. It’s an item called Hibiscadelphus giffardianus.

Does your house keep you poor? Wirth has this problem in a curious form. The real estate in his charge includes 62 sets of prehistoric ruins which must be kept in a kind of suspended ruination. That comes high: It costs $8000 a year to maintain the ruins in Mesa Verde, Colorado, and Wirth figures those at Chaco Canyon, in New Mexico, need $65,000 worth of work to put them back in their old, terrible shape.

Wirth can expect trouble from every quarter; even so, there are surprises. Along with being the boss of 3,600 employees, with whom he gets along splendidly, Wirth is the boss of 300 statues, mostly in battlefields. One of the statues has given him a good deal of trouble. Lightning knocked both arms and the head off a thirteen-foot figure of Liberty, atop an 87-foot shaft at Yorktown, where Cornwallis surrendered. A well-known sculptor is executing a new figure, on commission, but now refuses to put it on the shaft, which he contends is an eyesore.

And while name writers are a nuisance year in and out, it was a surprise when one of them chose Half Dome, in Yosemite. That great peak, looking like half a loaf of bread, presents a face of rock 2,000 feet high. High as it is, one visitor swung down on 20 feet of rope to paint his name. He chose too big a canvas; he ran out of paint after finishing only one initial.

If repining over human vandalism gets him nowhere, Wirth can worry about vandalism by buffalo. The Yellowstone buffaloes long have been a joy but a care. Once they dwindled to 23. A small breeding stock was put inside fences and treated royally. The buffalo ranch worked fine; the buffaloes multiplied until there were hundreds.

But they got as tame as cattle, and just about as exciting to see. With free hay in winter, and no worries, they lost vigor, spirit, and tourist appeal. The duty of the Park Service is to preserve wildlife in the wild state. So it was necessary to wean the buffaloes from the easy life and turn them wild again. That was accomplished. But the buffaloes have a keen eye for luxury. About 1,000 head of the Yellowstone buffaloes come into the Firehole River region to spend their winters in steam-heated comfort beside the hot springs and geysers. It’s a good move; here they can get at the dried grass without rooting in snow.

But 1,000 buffaloes produce serious wear and tear. They have chipped away rock formations which took centuries to build. So a deal will have to be made whereby, in return for free hay, they stay away from the hot springs. The Park Service never attacked a preservation problem with such unmitigated success as in the case of the buffaloes. Where once the lordly buffalo was vanishing, there now are buffaloes all over the joint.

Preserving wildlife is tricky business. “Remove one thing,” said a great naturalist, “and you find it is hitched to everything else in the universe.” If the park rangers thin out the coyotes to protect the deer, the deer get so numerous they eat themselves and others out of browse. Then they go to town, where that is possible, and ransack garbage cans. Once they have tasted garbage, raw forage isn’t good enough.

The park director’s problems always include two or three creatures on the very brink of going extinct. Right now, the crisis cases are the black-footed ferret, the crocodile, and the nene. Only about 60 of the ferrets have been sighted in the last seven years, and a third of those were dead. An investigation is under way to find out what the ferrets need and how they can be coaxed to continue.

The nene is a long-legged, brown-necked little Hawaiian goose which may very well be the rarest creature on earth. Also called the “land-loving goose,” the nene is a waterfowl, but miserably maladjusted. It is not well equipped for swimming, nor is it much at flying. Instead, the nene prefers to walk, which it does with high steps, possibly because it walks much of the time on the rough lava slopes of the great volcano, Mauna Loa.

The nene was common enough at the start of the century, but now it is thought there may be no more than 50 left. Wirth thinks foreign birds imported to Hawaii may have brought ailments with which the nene can’t cope. Its worst visible enemy is the domestic pig, gone wild and tough. The pigs destroy the nests and young or keep the nenes too nervous to nest. Wild goats, meanwhile, devour the nenes’ favorite berries. There is hope of saving the poor slighted birds by giving them all possible protection in Hawaii National Park, but it will be a near thing. Rangers hunt down the pigs and goats, but have to stop shooting during the nenes’ nesting season so as not to disturb whatever nenes are left.

The crocodile certainly isn’t helpless and it may be a little hard to muster up a tear over the fact that this monster is scarce, but such is Wirth’s duty, as a wildlife preserver. The American crocodile never has been plentiful, even if you regard a very few crocodiles as plenty. Only one small section suits this salt-water nightmare, a strip about 100 miles long on the southeastern coast of Florida. Crocodile numbers have dwindled because anyone sighting a crocodile is likely to shoot it for its valuable hide, worth $4.50 a foot, and other crocodiles come to grief in fishermen’s drag seines.

Though the ugly creatures are classed as vanishing, naturalists think the crocodile can be saved. That’s because the Everglades National Park takes in Florida Bay, a favorite crocodile haunt, and park rangers war constantly on crocodile poachers. Along with being a sanctuary for crocodiles, and perhaps the only place in the world which is under water half the time and subject to terrific grass fires the rest, the Everglades park is also a home for put-upon manatees, so Wirth is the manatee’s foster mother as well as the comforter of the crocodile. Manatees are the weird sea cows which sailors of old mistook for mermaids, partly because it is the manatees’ sociable habit to swim flipper-in-flipper, partly because the manatee may sometimes be seen kissing, and partly because the sailors had been at sea a long, lonely time.

Killing the young for their tender flesh, said to resemble veal, has helped bring the sea cows to the verge of extermination, but these big hulks, averaging perhaps 500 pounds, are also extremely sensitive to cold air. They are air breathers, surfacing to breathe through the nose, and it is thought the cold air of the sudden Florida cold snaps gets them in the lungs.

The Everglades park is the only adequate sanctuary. Park Service officials would like to carry out a restoration program, but nobody knows just what to offer; less is known about the manatee than about almost any other form of wildlife. Wirth may have to create a duplicate of downtown Miami. The manatee seem happiest in the Miami River, in the heart of the city. On chilly days, they can keep warm next to outlets of big-city wastewater.

Short in the nene, ferret, crocodile, and manatee departments, Wirth is woefully long on elk, having far more than the parks can pasture. Last winter, in four huge corral-like traps costing $10,000 each, Yellowstone rangers live-trapped 219. The elk lift got rid of 125. The elk lift consists of hauling the elk out of the park, into open hunting country, by truck. The rest were given to various parks for stocking purposes. Still others wandered out on their own. But there were still far too many elk, so aerial elk shooing was tried. A plane and a helicopter were able to chase several herds over park boundaries. All told, the winter’s efforts may have reduced the elk population by 1,000. Good? Yes, but only a starter. It still leaves a remarkable excess — about 4,600 elk too many.

Wirth’s collection of peculiar problems includes international smugglers, dealing, of all things, in a harmless form of wax. These are rifle-toting bands, bad all out of proportion to their contraband, and given to shooting. The wax is made by cooking the candelilla plant, and is used in shoe polish, floor wax, phonograph records, and medicine. The wax runners smuggle it in from Mexico via the Big Bend National Park, in Texas, defying Mexican law, which says all such wax must be marketed through the government.

But things never are so bad as they might be for Wirth. He has one stanch ally — the grand old law of compensation. The improbable happens, but the probable desists. The wild parks are full of danger — great glaciers, cliffs, geysers throwing fountains of scalding water, steam jetting from hillsides, lakes at altitudes where the strongest swimmers tire quickly. Thousands of the park visitors never before saw country wilder than a vacant lot. Yet the fatality rate is spectacularly low. Men, women, and children survive remarkable adventures, and Wirth hears tale after tale of valiant rescue.

Burdette Yeoman and his wife were hiking in Yosemite. Yeoman leaned over a waterfall to get a drink. He slipped and was washed away. Terrified, his wife leaped in after him. Yeoman was carried a wild 100 feet, mostly down, falling, sliding, bounced against boulders. Then he scrambled ashore. But his wife was carried twice as far, into great rocks, over several cascades.

She ended in a pool, with severe injuries of head and body. A medical student gave first aid, a Boy Scout went for the rangers, a doctor drove two hours and then hiked seven miles to reach the injured woman. She was carried out by night on a stretcher — and recovered nicely. In March of 1954, 17-year-old Dolores Van Parys, of Seattle, slipped on snow in Mt. Rainier National Park and fell 175 feet to a mound of ice. But she struck a glancing blow, slid down the ice into a snowbank, and came through it alive.

Last summer, swinging down on a rope in descending Grand Teton, Norma Hart, of Lynn, Massachusetts, fell 35 feet when the rope gave. She landed in a sitting position. The terrible jolt broke her back in two places. She was at 12,000 feet. She had to be brought down in a basket stretcher, belayed down sheer cliffs, carried across hazardous slopes and snowfields. The rescue involved 27 park rescue experts, three volunteer climbers, and one professional guide. In a classic of skill and exertion they worked 24 hours, but they saved her.

Each year, recently, has brought mountain climbers in record numbers. Many get in trouble, but are rescued.

Excellent planning accounts in part for the fine safety record. Though Kilauea volcano in Hawaii had been quiet 18 years, they were ready when it erupted one midnight in 1952. In five months, 450,000 visitors flocked to look down on the great lake of fire. Nobody got hurt except a man who chose this opportunity to commit suicide. The final report said, “30,000 cars parked, one fender scratched.”

Every year children get lost in the great wild parks, but almost always the story has the same ending: the child is found intact and unalarmed, by adults worn to a frantic frazzle. Rangers found a lost boy in Yosemite, a rover so young he knew his first name, but not his last.

“We’ll identify him through the family car,” the rangers said craftily … “Jimmy, does your dad’s car have two doors on the side or one? What color is it? Do you know what kind?” Jimmy knew — a two-door blue sedan. “Now all we have to do,” said the rangers, “is to drive around the various campsites until we spot the right car.” Two fruitless hours later, they told Jimmy, “Now don’t get excited, but we can’t seem to find your dad’s car.”

Jimmy wasn’t excited, and he wasn’t surprised either. “Of course you can’t,” he said. “We came in Uncle Joe’s car.”

Wirth’s job makes him a big-time resort proprietor, the boss of 23 hotels and lodges, 4,086 cabins, 1,511 tents. Unfortunately, what that comes to is “not nearly enough.” He has 15,000 miles of roads to maintain, he has general supervision of 200 concessions doing $30,000,000 worth of business a year. Indirectly, this puts Wirth in a variety of business enterprises ranging from renting pack horses to running mineral baths. He is also the boss of 114 museums, the chief of a small force of traffic cops on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, and the custodian of 527 buildings of historical significance, most of which need something.

He is a man of consequence in 39 states and four possessions, and he is also chief yardbird for the White House. In a sense he is the President’s landlord, the White House being Reservation No. 1 in the capital’s park system, which is another of Wirth’s responsibilities. In a much clearer sense, he is the emergency gardener. When Queen Wilhelmina was about to visit Washington in 1952, Wirth had to raise 2,000 tulips at racing speed, so her majesty would see them blooming. He came through, and the tulips lasted long enough, but no longer; they had been forced far too fast.

No other government agency is in so many lines of business. “We don’t run any streetcars,” Wirth says cheerfully, meaning that the NPS does run everything else. In general, the customers are fairly well satisfied, though surveys produce criticism on unexpected points. Here is some of the adverse criticism: “Some of your deer have nasty dispositions.” … “Where did you hide the bears?” … “People ghastly compared to the scenery.” … “Get longer beds.” … “Have more snow.” … “How about installing bowling?” The complaint registered by two New Yorkers about Yosemite, surely one of the most beautiful spots on Earth, proves that Wirth can’t hope to please all of the people all of the time. “There’s no dancing tonight,” they said. “What are you supposed to do — look at the scenery?”

Wirth tackles his assorted duties with unfailing calm and a good deal of zest, though this isn’t the way he expected to spend his life. A landscape architect, he planned to devote himself to private practice, dealing in subdivisions and country clubs rather than geysers and battlefields. Parks were a little overly familiar: Wirth was born in one city park, raised in another, worked in parks every summer as a boy. That was enough for his older brother, Theodore Jr. He went to sea and became a rear admiral. Except for the admiral, however, it’s a park family. Conrad’s younger brother, Walter, is park superintendent at Salem, Oregon; Conrad’s older son, Ted, is in the NPS office in Omaha.

Wirth is the son of a highly successful park man, the late Theodore Wirth Sr. Theodore Wirth came here from Switzerland, after studying horticulture in France and England. For six years he was a gardener in Central Park, New York, and on private estates in Long Island, and then became park superintendent in Hartford, Connecticut. Conrad was born there, in the superintendent’s residence in Elizabeth Park.

When Conrad was nine, the family moved to Minneapolis, where his father developed a park system which won world-wide attention. A bold and imaginative builder, the elder Wirth also put forward an idea now generally accepted, but then brand-new. Parks, he held, are for recreation as well as beauty; this calls for tennis courts and baseball diamonds as well as rose gardens.

Conrad Wirth couldn’t have had a better teacher. But when he got out of Massachusetts University he went into private practice, first in San Francisco, then New Orleans. For four years he had nothing to do with parks. The Gulf country was booming, and Wirth and his partner, Harold Neale, worked on projects of considerable splendor. The biggest was the Pass Christian Island development, a 5,000-acre venture involving the creation of islands and canals and intended to rival Florida at its flossiest.

But the Florida boom collapsed, and all around the Gulf big plans went glimmering. Property was selling for ten cents on the dollar. Nobody needed landscape architects to plan multimillion-dollar dream cities. “I’d have been glad to plan a miniature golf course,” says Wirth.

Just when he needed it most, he was offered a post on the Planning Commission for Washington, D.C. There he got to know Park Service men, like their devotion to the parks, their unusual esprit de corps. When they had an opening in 1931, he took it gladly and was back in the family business, parks. His brother, the admiral, held out staunchly, but the land got him in the end. After World War II he was appointed superintendent of buildings and grounds at Annapolis, and later went into the real-estate business in California.

Wirth’s work for 20 years was long-range planning. Some of it is only now bearing fruit; one result is the new Cape Hatteras Seashore Recreational Area, a brand-new type of national playground. Nowhere in the system was there a great stretch of Atlantic seacoast still undeveloped. Wirth studied every mile of the coast and found nothing to compare with the picturesque islands making up North Carolina’s outer banks. To get what he wanted took 20 years, but in his work you have to have patience.

Adding to this park or that, Wirth handled massive land deals, in one case swapping 180,000 acres of grazing land for 10,000 acres of valuable timber owned by Montana, but inside Glacier National Park. He made himself an authority on “inholdings” and hopes before he retires to see many of these disappear. Inholdings are land privately owned, but inside the parks. Inside Mammoth Cave National Park, for instance, there are two privately owned caves. The Park Service hopes to buy them in time, but good caves run high these days; this pair will cost around $500,000. For a long time the government didn’t own the actual site where Cornwallis surrendered, in Yorktown battlefield, but Wirth bought that in 1948.

Wirth has had a hand in developing 561 city and state parks as well as the national ones. That came about in the days of the Depression, when, as Interior’s representative, he had charge of CCC camps which built or improved parks all over the land. He sighs, these shorthanded days, for the crew he had then — 95,000 young men, 17 to 23, who could do anything from stringing power lines to digging artificial lakes. For years to come, vacationists will have a better time because we had that siege of unemployment in the grim ’30s. Virginia had one state park in 1933, for example; by 1942 it had six, drawing just under 500,000 visitors a year. It is estimated that Wirth and his CCC boys put park work forward 50 years.

Wirth became director in December of 1951. He is one of the few top officials to survive the change of administration; Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay decided that Wirth was uniquely qualified for a highly difficult job and ought not to be disturbed. “It is men like this,” says Secretary McKay, “that give to government service the prestige it deserves.” To repay his work and worry, he can reflect on solid accomplishments. The Cape Hatteras seashore — “the finest beach preservation in the world” — is his special pride. Land buying will be finished this summer. Both millionaires and bums contributed to this newest of the parks. The wealthy patrons were Paul Mellon and Mrs. Ailsa Mellon Bruce, children of the late Andrew; they put up $618,000. This is a form of philanthropy Wirth is cultivating hard. A special booklet, titled TheFifth Essence, is put before ladies and gentlemen of wealth, inviting contributions to the National Park Trust Fund. The frugal Wirth got a donation to publish this appeal, and the book carries no publication date, so it can’t get dated.

The down-and-outers who helped with Hatteras were on the Outer Banks in “transient camps” in the ’30s; some had been bonus marchers in 1932. The sea was making inroads, and the campers tied down the shifting dunes with brush fences and tough grass. One of the campers came back to show his wife where he had worked as a jobless and penniless youth, and what the pleasant consequences have been. The ex-bum couldn’t tarry. A big wheel now, he was on his way to Florida for a winter vacation, driving his expensive new car.

This year also should see the creation of Cumberland Gap National Monument, a 21,000-acre park in Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and Harpers Ferry National Monument, in West Virginia and Maryland. Another major project is under way at Independence Hall, which will stand in a setting of dignity and charm at the end of a three-block mall. And the Statue of Liberty, a shabby disgrace five years ago, has been refurbished.

There is also a new deal for concession operators, expected to produce better service for tourists. The parks now take a percentage of the gross instead of the net, and Wirth tries to extract a promise of bigger and better facilities in return. Major improvement is under way in Grand Teton, including a whole new tourist village; it is the first large-scale development in any national park in 30 years.

But these are bright spots in a dark picture. Every year brings more visitors, coming earlier, staying later. This is precisely what the parks are for, and should be a sight to gladden the eye — the free citizens of America, taking their ease in great pleasuring grounds where the wilderness is preserved for posterity. The trouble is, the parks are in no shape to accommodate so much business.

“Some of the camping grounds are so crowded,” Wirth says, “that they amount to outdoor slums. Before the war, the biggest attendance was 21 million. Last year it hit 46 million. In 1941 we had $84,000,000 to run the park system; last year we had $34,000,000. What we’re trying to do just can’t be done; it’s like trying to put two gallons of water into a one-gallon bucket.”

Badly as he needs money for development, he needs maintenance money worse. Little could be done during the war. Budgets since then have been too small to allow any catching up. The backlog of needed work — roads, buildings, additional campsites — is now a towering $600,000,000. Wirth says he could usefully and sensibly spend $60,000,000 a year for the next ten years, and that this might save the parks. “Save,” he insists, is not too strong.

“Take Yellowstone,” he says. “Yellowstone will be destroyed if things keep on as they’re going; literally destroyed. Crowds are walking all over the formations, vandalism is more and more prevalent. We ought at least to keep what we’ve got, and we’re not doing it. All we can do is put patch on patch, and that’s bad business, whether it’s a national park or a private home.”

Cabins are a major dilemma. The parks need them, and concession operators would build them — but not until there are suitable sites. That means light, sewer, and water systems. Wirth hasn’t got the money. His chances of getting as much money as he needs don’t seem bright, but Wirth tackles the job cheerfully. His best bet, he sees clearly, is to persuade Congress and the nation that it would be money well and profitably spent.

“Twenty-three states,” he says, “say travel is one of their three biggest industries. The business can’t be measured accurately, but it’s estimated to run somewhere between 12 and 30 billion a year. It is believed the parks generate more than two billion dollars of this. If so, they are responsible for 580 million which gets back to the states and the federal government in taxes. It works out to 150 million in local taxes and 430 million in federal.

“As I say, this travel business is a by-product, not our principal purpose — which is to help people enjoy and understand the God-given wonders of our country. But it’s a by-product too valuable to lose. Some say we can’t afford to put the parks in shape and keep them that way. I say we can’t afford not to. They’re making the federal government 430 million a year in taxes, and the government is spending only 33 million on them. It’s bad business to let a plant be destroyed when it produces that kind of a return.”

Half the time in Washington, half in the field, Wirth commonly works seven days a week, and seven nights. It’s a job which would give many a man ulcers in three months, and often seems thankless. There are doubtless days when Wirth feels like the Indian who was flown to Yellowstone last summer to fight a forest fire. That’s hot work, and after several days of it, he paused, leaned on his shovel and shook his head. “ Gentlemen,” he said to his Indian companions, “let’s give this country back to the white man.”

But Wirth is lively and resilient, and there is much about the job he likes a great deal. It is work with big consequences; a lot rides on Wirth’s judgment. He likes the fact that it’s “not just for today.” Americans will enjoy that new seashore at Hatteras, for instance, for hundreds of years.

Moreover he knows the Park Service has many well-wishers. In Glacier, a cigar-smoking taxpayer took Wirth aside for a pep talk. “Don’t let people run cattle in the parks,” he said. “Don’t let anybody cut those trees. The parks are for the wildlife and the people. Anything I can do, let me know.” This red-hot conservationist was Groucho Marx.

]]>Vintage Ad Gallery: Selling the National Parkshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/30/archives/advertisements-archives/vintage-ad-gallery-selling-national-parks.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/30/archives/advertisements-archives/vintage-ad-gallery-selling-national-parks.html#commentsWed, 30 Mar 2016 14:00:19 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=114647Long before there was a National Park Service, Americans were traveling to the parks on horseback and in stagecoaches. After the railroads began building spur lines to the parks, they started advertising their park routes to Post readers.

]]>Long before there was a National Park Service, Americans were travelling to the parks on horseback and in stagecoaches. But at the turn of the century, the railroads began building spur lines to the parks and lodges for park guests. And they started advertising their park routes to Post readers. The ads ran well into the 1950s, when families preferred to reach the parks in the family car.

The old rail lines dropped passenger service long ago, but their routes to the parks are now served by Amtrak, which provides transportation to 237 of the National Park Service’s properties.

Union Pacific to YellowstoneJune 25, 1910

When it was established in 1872, Yellowstone Park was accessible only by horseback or carriage. Consequently, the park had only 1,000 visitors a year. By 1902, the Union Pacific Railroad had started passenger service to the park, carrying travelers from the Idaho Falls station to the park entrance in a stagecoach. Shortly before this ad appeared, however, it had opened passenger service on a line from St. Anthony, Idaho, to the park’s west entrance.

Great Northern to GlacierApril 29, 1916

The Great Northern Railway Company, created in 1889, grew across the Great Plains from St. Paul into North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. When the railway recognized the appeal of Glacier National Park, it built stations at the park’s west and east entrances, its rail line crossing the continental divide. It also built Glacier Park Lodge, which is shown in the background of this ad.

Milwaukee RoadJune 21, 1924

The Milwaukee Road was proud of its electric locomotive service when it was introduced in 1919. They staged public demonstration to show that its Class EP-2 electric engine could out-pull steam locomotives. This electric engine pulled the Olympian, the company’s passenger train that ran from Chicago to Seattle, stopping at Rainier National Park.

Northern PacificJuly 12, 1930

The North Coast Limited operated between Chicago and Seattle from 1900 to 1971. When this ad appeared, the Limited was making its 2,331-mile run in 63 hours — incredibly fast for that time. The Northern Pacific had also just upgraded the passenger cars, adding barber and valet service, separate bath and showers for men and women, and even radios on board!

Santa Fe to Grand CanyonOctober 25, 1947

The Santa Fe first built a spur line from Williams, Arizona, to the Grand Canyon in 1901. In 1905, it completed construction of the famous El Tovar Hotel, operated by the Fred Harvey Company. It was located right on the South Rim of the Canyon, just 300 feet from the railroad station.

Union Pacific to Bryce CanyonApril 10, 1948

The Utah Parks Company, run by the Union Pacific Railway, managed several inns and lodges in Cedar City, Utah. From there, rail passengers would be driven by bus to Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and other sites.

White/Union Pacific BusesJune 20, 1931

Starting business as a sewing-machine manufacturer, the White Company began making vehicles in 1900 and continued until 1980. The company developed its buses specifically to provide passenger service through the national parks. They were unique for their canvas tops, which could be rolled back for sightseeing in good weather. Today, 43 White buses are still providing transportation at Glacier and Yellowstone, as well as Gettysburg National Battlefield.

GreyhoundMarch 29, 1931

Greyhound Lines began in 1914, when an out-of-work car salesman offered rides to miners who wanted to hit the saloons in Alice, Minnesota. Within four years, his company had grown into a profitable 18-bus company. By the year of this ad, the company had combined 100 different bus lines and was offering service over 40,000 miles. Travelers often chose to take the bus because it was cheaper than the train.

U.S. Royal CordsJuly 21, 1928

It would have been an intrepid motorist who drove the family to the parks back in the 1910s­. The western roads were often unpaved and filled with debris. Blowouts were a frequent, time-consuming annoyance to passengers. By the late 1920s, though, tires had become smaller and wider. The new profile made riding more comfortable. And reinforcements by cord fiber in the rubber made them more durable.

Oregon HighwaysApril 23, 1938

By 1938, federal programs like the CCC and WPA had expanded and improved the country’s highway system. For Americans fortunate enough to afford the car and gas (10 cents a gallon), the national parks were never more accessible.

Coca-ColaJune 13, 1931

The Old Faithful Inn, shown in this Coke ad, was built in 1905 and was operated by the Northern Pacific Railroad. Today, the park takes measures to keep bears and tourists far apart. Visitors are strictly warned against feeding bears — or giving them soft drinks.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/30/archives/advertisements-archives/vintage-ad-gallery-selling-national-parks.html/feed1Damming the Parkshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/29/history/post-perspective/damming-the-parks.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/29/history/post-perspective/damming-the-parks.html#commentsTue, 29 Mar 2016 14:13:27 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=114632In 1950, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian warned the American people to keep an eye on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Project, which proposed a dam that would cover most of Dinosaur National Monument.

]]>“If the people of the United States want their Grand Canyon to remain as it is, they had better keep an eye on it,” Bernard DeVoto warned in a 1950 Post article. “Most people who have seen the Grand Canyon consider it our supreme natural spectacle. What would it look like if the Colorado River at the bottom of the gorge, the river that carved the gorge, were to be made a dry streambed?”

Read those words today, and your first thought might go to climate change, remembering the California drought headlines or a photo of the bleached river basin you saw on your smartphone at breakfast. But in 1950, DeVoto was protesting the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Project.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian was among the first to bring national opposition to the project’s three major dam proposals — Bridge Canyon, Echo Park, and Glen Canyon. Echo Park was the most controversial as it would cover most of Dinosaur National Monument, and in the end, only Glen Canyon Dam was built, but its benefits are still debated to this day.

Do you want these wild splendors kept intact for your kids to see? Then watch out for the Army Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation — because right where the scenery is, that’s where they want to build dams.

No one has asked the American people whether they want their sovereign rights, and those of their descendants, in their own publicly reserved beauty spots wiped out. Thirty-two million of them visited the National Parks in 1949. More will visit them this year. The attendance will keep on increasing as long as they are worth visiting, but a good many of them will not be worth visiting if engineers are let loose on them.

Most people who have seen the Grand Canyon consider it our supreme natural spectacle. What would it look like if the Colorado River at the bottom of the gorge, the river that carved the gorge, were to be made a dry streambed?

After the Green River flows out of Wyoming to cross parts of Northwestern Colorado and Northeastern Utah, it roars and riots through a series of deep, narrow canyons, one of which is named Lodore. If a dam were to transform the tempestuous Green in Lodore Canyon into a lake 500 feet deep, would you drive 2,000 miles to sail a dinghy there?

These and other areas of unmatched beauty or sublimity, which were made National Parks or National Monuments so that they could be preserved untouched forever, are in danger of being ruined by engineering projects. Should we let them be ruined?

The National Park Service is a bureau of the Department of the Interior, where, in appropriations, it is overshadowed by the Bureau of Reclamation, which builds dams. Though the Park Service has other duties, its primary job is to administer the National Parks and Monuments. The act of Congress which created it directed it “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

The legally enacted policy cannot be misconstrued: the parks and monuments are to be preserved as they are naturally, without defacement. It has been maintained so far, though not without hard effort. Because some of these areas contain valuable minerals, timber, water resources, and water power, there have been many attempts to get the law changed so that they could be exploited. These attempts, which would ruin the parks if they succeeded, have heretofore usually been made by private groups intent on getting hold of public resources for their own profit.

In the last few years, however, a curious development has brought the National Park System under attack by two public agencies. Each of them has about a third of a billion dollars of public funds to spend every year, and so can exert incomparably more pressure than any corporation that ever cast a covetous eye on the wilderness beauties which were set aside for posterity to enjoy. One of these agencies is the Bureau of Reclamation, the other the Corps of (Army) Engineers. Their campaign of attrition raises fundamental questions about our grandchildren’s heritage of wilderness scenery. It also involves serious issues in regard to the power of Federal agencies to subvert public policy. How the campaign works and what hinges on it can be clearly seen in the current effort of the Bureau of Reclamation to get authorization, which is now not legally possible, to make over Lodore Canyon in Colorado.

The canyon was named and first traversed by the adventurous one-armed geologist, John Wesley Powell, on his exploration of the Green and Colorado rivers. It was on June 8, 1869, that he took his boats into this deep and narrow gorge. Confined between sandstone walls that are alternately overhanging and set back in terraces, the Green here becomes an unimaginably violent chaos of rapids, falls, whirlpools, sucks, and chutes. This 20-mile stretch is one of the most hazardous — and most spectacular — parts of the so-far-untamed Green River.

Here Is One of Our Great Scenic Areas

Before entering Lodore Canyon, the Green flows tranquilly through a mountain meadow called Brown’s Park. At the lower end of the canyon it emerges into another beautiful, high-walled valley which Powell named Echo Park. Massive rock formations rise from the floor of Echo Park, and here the Yampa River flows into the Green from the east, having just emerged from a narrow, twisting canyon wholly unlike Lodore, but equally overpowering. The Green then flows westward through two more canyons. The setting of these four canyons is a landscape of brilliantly colored, fantastically eroded mesas, buttes, mountains, gulches, and high basins. A panorama of fantasy, overwhelming to the imagination, this high rock desert has certain resemblances to the Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon country and to Cedar Breaks, all in Utah, and to the setbacks and vistas of the Grand Canyon, which is in Arizona. But as each of these tremendous spectacles is, it is unique, of its own individual character and quality. It is one of the great scenic areas of the United States.

In 1938, Lodore Canyon, Yampa Canyon, Echo Park, the two subsidiary canyons and their rock-desert setting — 327 square miles all told — were made a National Monument and transferred from the public domain to the National Park System. If the area had been called, say, Green River National Monument, its nature and importance would have been self-evident in the name. But a National Monument already existed at its western edge, a small tract of 80 acres which had been set aside to protect the greatest known deposit of Mesozoic fossils, especially dinosaurs. The new reservation was added to this and the whole received the name of the original small part, Dinosaur National Monument. As a result, during the effort to keep a magnificent scenic wilderness from being defaced, many people have supposed that only the quarry where dinosaur fossils are excavated is at stake, though, as a matter of fact, the quarry has never been endangered.

When the monument was established, most of Brown’s Park was left outside the boundaries. This exclusion was made because, years earlier, the Reclamation Service — now the Bureau of Reclamation — had declared Brown’s Park a possible site for a reclamation project — that is, for a reservoir from which water could be pumped to irrigate a small area in Eastern Utah. The Bureau of Reclamation has by now abandoned whatever intention it may have had of so using Brown’s Park. But it has undertaken to construct a hydroelectric-power development in Dinosaur National Monument. Both the laws which govern power projects and those which protect the National Park System forbid the construction of power dams in National Parks and National Monuments. There are, however, various ways of skinning a cat if you are good with a skinning knife. No one has ever said that the Bureau of Reclamation isn’t.

In 1943, the First Assistant Secretary of the Interior made a “reclamation withdrawal” covering most of Dinosaur National Monument — that is, he officially declared it an area which could be used for reclamation projects. The “withdrawal” was almost certainly unauthorizable and therefore of no force. Furthermore, it was so smothered in administrative routine that, though it would destroy the monument, the National Park Service did not learn of it when it was made. On the basis of this questionable and semicovert withdrawal for reclamation — for irrigation — the bureau then began to plan a power development, which is prohibited. It proposed to build two dams with attendant power plants, one at Echo Park, the other at Split Mountain, farther down Green River. The estimated cost of the project is $207 million.

The National Park Service first heard of the project as a daydream of the Bureau of Reclamation in connection with a vast plan for the transformation of the West called the Colorado River Project. The Green River is, of course, part of the Colorado River system. It was, so to speak, a theoretical, just possible expedient to be tentatively considered in case equivalent results could be secured nowhere else in the Colorado River basin — and to be considered then only after exhaustive study and only after consultation with the National Park Service.

In spite of this understanding, and without consulting the Park Service or obtaining clearance from the Secretary of the Interior, the bureau laid the Dinosaur Monument project before the bodies that administer the interstate agreement which apportions water from the Colorado River. In February of this year those bodies recommended the immediate construction of Echo Park Dam. This would require legislation from Congress to authorize construction that is now prohibited in the monument — and the heat was on. Especially, the heat was on the Secretary of the Interior, one of whose duties is to protect the public interests — your interests — in the National Park System. The Western bloc worked smoothly. When Secretary Chapman ordered a public hearing, four Western senators and five Western congressmen appeared to add their testimony to that of embattled mayors and chambers of commerce that the nation would be well served by the abandonment of the policy which has protected the National Parks.

They Say It’s Necessary for Irrigation

The hearing disclosed that not only heat had been generated but much fog, or smoke screen, as well. The Echo Park and Split Mountain project is solely a power development, but it received much support it otherwise might not have got because it has been represented in the West, where irrigation is a sacred word, as an irrigation project. Again, the people of Utah have come, or have been led, to believe that water which the state has been allotted from the Colorado can be got to a still theoretical and prodigiously expensive reclamation project in Central Utah only from the reservoirs which the Bureau of Reclamation has planned in Dinosaur Monument. Actually, the bureau’s own plans show that this water is to be taken from another project, farther up Green River and outside the monument. Utah and neighboring states have come, or have been led, to believe that these dams are indispensable for storage water allotted them from the Colorado. Actually, the bureau plans to provide most of this storage at another dam far to the south of the monument, and the rest of it — if any more is needed for the allocations — could be provided at other sites outside the monument.

Finally, Utah believes that the sites of these dams are the only ones where power for its still-theoretical project could be generated, whereas there are many feasible sites outside Dinosaur Monument. And at the public hearing, Gen. U.S. Grant III, himself an engineer, showed that the use of one of these other sites would reduce the cost of the project by a third. Nevertheless, the various appeals mentioned above have been blended to make a really formidable confusion.

No Western state would receive any benefit from the construction of these dams inside the monument that could not be insured by alternative construction outside it. What about the people of the United States as a whole, whose property the monument is? On behalf of sectional and even local interests, the general public will have to pay the nonrecoverable cost, always a large fraction of the total cost, of a $207 million project. In return it will suffer the permanent ruin of an area of great natural beauty.

For it will be permanently ruined. If you cut down a forest, Nature will probably grow another one in the course of a few centuries, but if you change a river, a mountain or a canyon, you can never change it back again. The downriver dam in Dinosaur Monument would defile the mountain-park country along and below it and substitute a placid reservoir for the turbulent river above it. The other one, Echo Park Dam, would back water so far that throughout the whole extent of Lodore Canyon the Green River, the tempestuous, pulse-stirring river of John Wesley Powell, would become a mere millpond. The same would happen to Yampa Canyon.

Throughout both canyons the deep artificial lakes would engulf magnificent scenery, would reduce by from a fifth to a third the height of the precipitous walls, and would fearfully degrade the great vistas. Echo Park and its magnificent rock formations would be submerged. Dinosaur National Monument as a scenic spectacle would cease to exist.

A specious argument which has been used in connection with this assault on Dinosaur Monument is also a steadily increasing danger to other parts of the National Park System. We long ago passed the point where reclaimed Western land could repay the cost of the projects that reclaimed it, as it was originally intended to do. If it costs several hundred dollars an acre to make land worth $50 an acre, the rest of the cost must be charged to something besides reclamation. If the project includes the production of electricity, the sale of power will take care of part of the remainder. If it includes flood protection — and, nowadays, try to find any dam on any babbling brook that is not supposed to — whatever fraction of the remainder can be allocated to flood control can be written off altogether, since the whole country benefits from reduction of flood losses. But honest cost accounting ends right there; no additional economic justification can be found. Hence the Bureau of Reclamation has begun to publicize a shimmering but carefully unanalyzed value which it calls “recreation.”

If the bureau can successfully allege that its projects create facilities for recreation, then it can charge to them as much of the uneconomic cost as it is able to get away with. Nobody doubts that the American people need facilities for recreation and will need more of them as our population increases. But what kind, where, at what cost, and who shall pay for them? Should we write off $10 million of the cost of an irrigation project because it will provide bass fishing for one North Dakota county? Should Philadelphia and Birmingham be taxed to provide sailboating for Las Vegas?

If it is able to force the Echo Park project through, the Bureau of Reclamation will build some fine highways along the reservoirs. Anyone who travels the 2,000 miles from New York City — or 1,200 from Galveston or 1,000 from Seattle — will no doubt enjoy driving along those roads. He can also do still-water fishing where, before the bureau took benevolent thought of him, he could do only white-water fishing, and he can go boating or sailing on the reservoirs that have obliterated the scenery.

But the New Yorker can go motoring along the Palisades, boating in Central Park, sailing at Larchmont and fishing at many places within an hour of George Washington Bridge. No one will ever drive 2,000 miles to row a boat; no one will ever seek recreation in a National Park except the kind for which the “pleasuring ground” was created — the unique experience of awe and wonder that an untouched wilderness spectacle provides. The only reason why anyone would ever go to Dinosaur National Monument is to see what the Bureau of Reclamation proposes to destroy.

But keeping informed about such attacks on the National Parks is extremely difficult. These plans may be vital for the future of the West, and the future of the West is vitally important to the United States. But the people have no adequate idea of how sound the plans may be, how far some of them may fail, how much money may be wasted. Engineers of unimpeachable professional standing have asserted that large parts of them are mistakenly conceived or even potentially disastrous. But the public has no chance to judge.

It is, in fact, almost impossible to bring effective criticism to bear on the projects of these two agencies. As far as the individual citizen is concerned, the data are kept secret. They are not publicized outside the West and only the favorable ones are publicized there. By the time a project is laid before Congress it has already been decided upon, the local interests have been organized and the Western senators and representatives — one of the most powerful blocs in Congress — have been lined up. Within the West there is severe infighting for the allocation of projects, but when it comes to getting projects to be allocated, there are neither state nor party lines: there is only a solid West. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Engineers have a vested institutional interest in the West, the interest not only of continuing to function but of expanding and growing more powerful. They have vast sums of money to spend. Their preliminary planners, field agents, and entire official hierarchy readily lay down the shovel and the hoe, and pick up the microphone at any hint that their plans may be interfered with or even inquired into. Both are able to summon to their support an organized political pressure that only nationwide public opinion could defeat.

That is the larger picture into which the assault on the National Parks fits. Unquestionably, the national interest requires the parks and monuments to be preserved unmarred, as they were intended to be.

No emergency serious enough to justify invading the National Park System arose during either World War. No emergency is in sight now. But with as much time for planning as might be required, with promising and perhaps better alternatives only cursorily investigated, the Bureau of Reclamation is able to threaten Dinosaur National Monument with destruction. And probably the bureau’s hand was not idle in a California agitation that has succeeded in introducing into Congress a bill to investigate all the possible power sites in Kings Canyon National Park. This park preserves the most magnificent mountain country in California outside Yosemite Park. Its boundaries were drawn so as to exclude areas which ought to have been included, but which were left out precisely because they were valuable power sites. The Engineers threaten Mammoth Cave with a dam which even Kentucky does not want. They threaten Glacier Park with a dam which they formally agreed not to build.

If any of these attempts should succeed, the law which protects the parks will be circumvented and there will be no protecting any of them from similar impairment thereafter. The parks do not belong to any bureau, any group of planners or engineers, any state or section. They belong to all of us. Do we want them? Will our grandchildren want them?

]]>In 2009, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns produced a six-episode tribute, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, with Dayton Duncan. Despite being filmed at some of nature’s most spectacular locales — from Acadia to Yosemite, Yellowstone to the Grand Canyon, the Everglades of Florida to the Gates of the Arctic in Alaska — it is primarily a story of people: those who devoted themselves to saving a precious portion of the land they loved. At its heart, says Burns, the project is a story about the meaning of democracy.

We had the opportunity to interview Burns at the time of the film’s release. Following is a selection of Burns’ comments from that conversation:

The night before: “I didn’t sleep well the night before we started filming, and as I lay awake, I remembered a moment when I was 6 years old and my mother was dying of cancer. My father was absent in every sense of the word. But there was this day he took me to his house after school. He woke me up in the middle of the night and we drove to Shenandoah National Park at the top of Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge mountains. That was the first and only road trip I ever took with him, and that was my first visit to a national park. Dad died while we were filming for this series in Yosemite.”

Ken Burns

Land for all to share: “For the first time in all of human history, land was set aside for everyone; not for kings or noblemen or the rich but for everyone. This is a story of how people from every conceivable background — rich and poor; famous and unknown; soldiers and scientists; natives and newcomers; idealists, artists, and entrepreneurs — struggled against those forces of development, those inquisitive and extractive forces that are always with us, that want to dam a river, that want to cut down a stand of trees, that want to mine a canyon. The national parks are the fruit of that desire to save some glimpse, some portion of the primeval existence, so that we would be able to remind ourselves how lucky we were to fall upon this beautiful Garden of Eden of a continent.”

A good problem: “The parks today get 275-million-plus visitations. After The Civil War [Burns’ acclaimed 1990 series] aired, visits increased dramatically at Gettysburg. The superintendent and I were walking toward the visitors’ center and he stooped down, picked up a candy wrapper, waved it in my face and said, ‘It’s all your fault.’ I hope that every park superintendent will be angry at us for drawing new visitors, even if there are traffic jams in Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. That’s a good problem to have. The worst thing is when nobody is coming. When nobody cares. The parks need every generation coming back and remembering how wonderful they are.”

Unspoiled places: “I’ll always remember the unexpected emotion I felt seeing our country at its best in unspoiled places. Looking at a river and not seeing a dam, walking through a stand of timber and not thinking about board feet, standing in a canyon and not caring about how much mineral wealth could be extracted. But there’s another part of that feeling. When you’re standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon looking down and seeing the Colorado River flow through rock that’s 1.7 billion years old, it matters very much who is holding your hand. Who you’ve made that trip with just as I did to Shenandoah National Park so many years ago. Could there be a better reason for saving these beautiful places?”

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/22/history/post-perspective/preserving-primeval.html/feed0National Park To-Do Listhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/15/health-and-family/travel/national-park-list.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/15/health-and-family/travel/national-park-list.html#respondWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113860Planning a trip to the national parks? Here are just a few of the thousands of fun activities you can take part in.

]]>Many Americans think of our national parks as places to go and see the sights, but there are so many things you can do in there, as well. Here are just a few of the fun excursions you can enjoy in our national parks:

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/15/health-and-family/travel/national-park-list.html/feed0A Landscape So Powerfulhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/08/health-and-family/travel/a-landscape-so-powerful.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/08/health-and-family/travel/a-landscape-so-powerful.html#respondWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=114391The notion of preserving, rather than exploiting, great swaths of land for future generations was a novel concept 100 years ago. It took the passage of a law to form the National Park Service.

]]>When I was in my late teens, some of my friends slung on backpacks and scooted off to see the world. As an East Coast city kid who’d never been past the Mississippi, I wanted to see America. So, after a certain amount of wheedling and cajoling, a friend and I convinced our parents that we could responsibly travel out West by ourselves one summer without getting into too much trouble.

It was a life-changing experience, and one of the highlights was riding up out of Jackson Hole and getting that stunning view of the Teton Mountains just shooting up from the valley floor.

When you’re 17, your first thought is I have to go up there. So, with no experience at such altitude and no technical gear whatsoever (my footwear, if you can call it that, consisted of a pair of work boots with balding tread), we climbed.

Middle Teton (the peak right next to Grand Teton) is a walkable ascent, except for one hairy short section near the top. After a full day’s slog up the glacier and a night camped at the treeline, we reached the peak on day two and munched on cheese sandwiches in the chill thin air. Before us lay a 360-degree view of jagged peaks and unspoiled valleys. About 1,000 feet down, a small lake, still frozen in July, appeared as a patch of turquoise.

And that’s just it. The very notion of preserving, rather than exploiting, great swaths of land for future generations was a novel concept 100 years ago. It took the passage of a law — with, I must add, a drumbeat of support from this magazine — to form the National Park Service. That landmark achievement is honored in this issue. As documentary filmmaker Ken Burns points out, “For the first time in all of human history, land was set aside for everyone; not for kings or noblemen or the rich but for everyone.”

In 1916, when Congress was considering the bill that would ultimately establish the U.S. National Park Service, the Post repeatedly showed its support. That year, a quick succession of editorials from Post editor George Horace Lorimer laid out his arguments for passage of the bill in the issues for January 1, February 12, and March 18.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/08/health-and-family/travel/a-landscape-so-powerful.html/feed0Saving America’s Living Monumentshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/08/history/post-perspective/saving-americas-living-monuments.html
Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:00:59 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=114372Horace Albright tells the story of a campaign to save “the Big Trees” for the public.

]]>When newspapers began printing reports in 1852 of the massive redwoods found along the West Coast, Americans took notice. Whether it was the fact that they were unique to the United States, their longevity, or their sheer size and strength, these giant sequoias stirred in us a sense of pride and patriotism. U.S. naturalists, for example, would have none of it when a British scientist wanted to name the giant redwood after the British general who defeated Napoleon. In fact, the redwood trees in California’s Mariposa Grove were among the first beneficiaries of federal protection when President Lincoln signed “The Yosemite and Big Tree Grant” in 1864, ceding land from Yosemite and Mariposa to the state of California.

But not all the nation’s redwood forests benefited from such protection. Although the Sequoia giganteum, the giant redwood, was of poor quality for lumber, the Sequoia sempervirens, the coastal redwood, was highly prized. The housing boom that accompanied the California Gold Rush turned acres of redwoods into homes. The rebuilding effort after a massive earthquake rocked San Francisco and left it burning for days also depleted the redwood forests, as did another housing boom after World War II.

Conservationists had their work cut out for them, but work they did. In the feature that follows — from the Post of February 7, 1953 — Horace Albright, the second director of the National Park Service, tells the story of a campaign that raised more than $5 million to save 60,000 acres of “the Big Trees” for the public.

How We Saved the Big Trees

By Horace M. Albright with Frank J. Taylor

February 7, 1953

The mighty redwoods would be practically extinct today — if it hadn’t been for a 30-year crusade of dickering, swapping, money raising, and political trading. Here, by the ex-boss of our National Parks, is the story behind that garnering of $5,000,000 and the saving of 60,000 acres of sequoias.

One day last summer Bernard M. Baruch, who delights in philosophizing on park benches, found himself in a unique setting. On his 82nd birthday, the sage elder statesman sat on a log beneath the world’s tallest living thing, a 364-foot redwood known as The Founders’ Tree in California’s fragrant, cathedral-like Humboldt State Park, and cogitated.

“I have sat upon many park benches, but never before on one in such a setting as this,” mused Baruch. “In the shade of this majestic tree, a man may refresh his spirit, drawing upon the strength and beauty of this living column.”

Many people have drawn strength from these forest giants, some of them thousands of years old. One distinguished visitor, Sir George Campbell, a British representative at the birth of the United Nations in San Francisco, even urged his fellow delegates to “meet outdoors in the great redwood forests”

Most of the people who experience this spiritual lift take the Big Tree groves for granted. The Big Trees were always there; they always will be. It comes as a jolting shock to learn that, except for the dedicated 30-year battle of a small group of Big Tree enthusiasts, most of these magnificent groves would have been stumps by now. Also, to discover that there are still some Big Trees yet to be saved from the lumbermen’s saws.

Along with other zealots, I have been up to my eyebrows in the intriguing, and at times baffling, hobby of saving the Big Trees. Outside of national parks, we don’t want to save all the Big Trees, only the so-called “museum stands.” These are the occasional groves so outstanding in beauty, setting, size, and age that they should be preserved and protected for posterity. We think our grandchildren and their children ought to be able to enjoy these samples of the primitive beauty of the land as it was before the white man applied his ruthless civilizing process to the continent.

Now you would think it would be fairly easy to set aside a few groves of Big Trees out of the vast primeval forests that once blanketed much of our land. It wasn’t. It has turned out to be one of the most difficult projects ever attempted. In fact, nothing short of a crusade could have recovered a small part of the heritage we allowed to slip away through negligence and chicanery.

I was first caught up in this cause in 1915, when I was assistant to Stephen T. Mather, founder and first director of the National Park Service, and the most zealous tree saver of us all. Later, succeeding him as director, I was in a position to spearhead the drive for a while. Since I quit public service in 1933 to head the United States Potash Company, I have devoted time and energy to helping complete the job. Being in the mining business, which utilizes something left for us beneath the earth by time and nature, I feel it my duty to help restore some of our natural resources for future generations. I still keep in touch with national and state park affairs and serve on boards and committees of conservation organizations, including the Save-the-Redwoods League. Not a year passes without some tree-saving project having my attention, and I am in constant touch with Newton B. Drury, secretary of the Save-the-Redwoods League for 20 years, director of the National Park Service for 10 years, and now chief of the California state-park system.

It took a lot of dickering, swapping, money raising and political jockeying to recover the thousands of acres of forest land that have been restored to the people. The Founders’ Tree, under which Bernie Baruch sat, is named for three farsighted visionaries, Pres. Henry Fairfield Osborn, of the American Museum of Natural History; Dr. John C. Merriam, of the University of California, later head of the Carnegie Institution in Washington; and Pres. Madison Grant, of the New York Zoological Society. I came near being the fourth horseman in this founders’ group, when, in the summer of 1917, I met Osborn, Merriam, and Grant at the Bohemian Grove, a small but impressive stand of redwoods saved from destruction by the Bohemian Club of San Francisco. They asked me to join them in a scouting trip into the redwood lumbering belt, where they heard that the Big Trees were being wiped out like so many cornstalks. Unfortunately, I was unable to go.

When Osborn, Merriam, and Grant returned from the scenes of devastation, there was fire in their eyes. They lost no time in organizing the Save-the-Redwoods League, with the enthusiastic aid of Steve Mather, former Congressman William Kent, and leaders of California’s Sierra Club. Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, was the first president, and today his ashes rest in Lane Grove, a memorial to him amid the redwoods. Starting with $100 in the kitty, these men launched what is undoubtedly the greatest private conservation movement on record, one that has raised over $5,000,000, for the most part matched with state funds, to purchase some 60,000 acres of sequoias for the public. Although the league was interested mainly in saving redwoods, its example led to the recovery of many acres of other museum stands of virgin timber — sugar pine, yellow or ponderosa pine, Douglas and other firs, spruce, Eastern hardwoods, swamp cypress, even desert saguaros and Joshua trees — all over the country.

To most people, the Big Trees are the sequoias, popularly called redwoods. There are two kinds of sequoia — the gigantea and the sempervirens. Remotely related, the two types of redwood have quite different growing habits, which added to our problems in saving them.

The gigantea, or Big Tree, which is the bulkiest and oldest living thing, survives from pre-glacial days only in damp, sheltered glades from 3,000 to 8,000 feet high on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada range. They have massive trunks insulated with spongy, reddish, almost-fireproof bark, and some of them are nearly 40 feet in diameter. Shallow-rooted, they balance on the surface, probably bulking over 3,000 tons. They sprout only from seed, and mature only after a millennium of growth. There are estimates of about 17,000 gigantea, 10 feet or more in diameter, growing in 70 small groves, extant out of ancient forests that are believed to have once grown widely in every Northern Hemisphere continent. These, generally speaking, are not only quite inaccessible to loggers, but the trees make inferior lumber, because of the brittleness of the wood.

The sempervirens, or coastal redwoods, on the other hand, thrive in the foggy, low regions from the Oregon border to below Big Sur, and fully 60 miles south of Monterey. Too numerous to count, they make excellent lumber, which is highly prized and high-priced. They are easily accessible by road and by railroad, and have been lumbered for a century. Not so thick of girth as the gigantea, they are taller and more graceful. Their grayish-brown bark is also almost fireproof. They grow in a dense, nearly unbroken forest that blankets valleys and hillsides in a narrow belt along the Northern California coast.

In one respect, the coastal redwoods are miracle trees. Soon after a monster is felled, its stump sends out hundreds of shoots. Within half a century a dozen survivors grow into marketable timber trees 100 feet tall. Hence their name, “sequoia everliving.” This reproductive facility made it all the harder to acquire stands of coast redwoods for park purposes, because timber owners are reluctant to part with redwood lands, even those that are cut over. They regard a stand of second-growth redwoods more highly than money in the bank.

When the Save-the-Redwoods crusade was launched in 1917 to protect some of these giants from the ax, there were only four small groves in public ownership. The state of California had one small grove set aside in Big Basin, near Santa Cruz, for a public park; Santa Cruz and Sonoma counties each had a small grove; and the Federal Government owned Muir Woods National Monument in the sheltered canyon at the base of Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco.

The Muir Grove had been bought by Congressman William Kent, who presented it to President Theodore Roosevelt for a national monument to thwart the plans of a local water company, which planned to flood the canyon for a reservoir. Kent had introduced a bill in Congress to authorize the purchase by the Federal Government of a sizable coast-redwood grove for a national park. When this was pigeonholed, Kent and his friend Mather concluded the only way to get another Federal grove was to raise money privately and buy it. With the Save-the-Redwoods League, they plotted to that end by stationing a large open automobile in the redwood area for what they called their “$10,000 tour,” a courtesy trip for anyone of means who might be inspired by a ride through the Big Tree groves to reach for his checkbook and help purchase a few trees.

To point up their sales talk, Mather and Kent took the tour themselves, with amusing results. On the Eel River in Humboldt County, they undertook to inspire some money-raising on a local level. Carried away by his own eloquence, Mather pledged $15,000 for himself, and an equal amount for Kent. This took Kent completely by surprise, but, being a man of means as well as a good sport, he wrote out his check to match Mather’s. That fattened the bank account of the Save-the-Redwoods League.

Later, in 1921, when the league was urging the California legislature to appropriate $300,000 to match private donations for the purchase of park areas, I was on a committee with Kent, Drury, and Dr. William Frederic Bade, president of the Sierra Club, to journey to Sacramento to appear before a joint senate-assembly committee considering appropriations. The legislators quickly endorsed our project, but thrifty Gov. William D. Stephens was so lukewarm, we feared he would veto the bill. Kent had known Stephens intimately when both were congressmen from California, so we decided to call on him.

The governor explained that the state was poor and the schools needed money, and he just couldn’t see spending the $300,000 for some trees. Kent leaped to his feet, pounded on the table, and shouted, “Hell, Bill, shut the schools down! The kids would enjoy it and it would only take them a year or two to make the work up! If these trees all go, it will take two thousand years to make them up!”

The governor signed the bill. The state funds enabled the league, which grew rapidly to 4,000 members, to double its purchases. Each of the league members contributed yearly, and there were some fat donations, particularly after the founders had lured some of their well-to-do friends into taking “the tour.” The $5,000,000 ultimately raised by the league, matched by state money, has bought 60 separate stands of trees along the Redwood Highway.

Mather hit the jackpot in 1926, when he induced John D. Rockefeller Jr., with his wife and three of his sons, to take the tour. After the trip, Mr. Rockefeller pledged $2,000,000 to purchase the Bull Creek Grove, near Dyerville, generally regarded as the most stately and beautiful forest in the world. A shy man, he declined to have the family name attached to the grove, and it has taken a quarter of a century, during which he has contributed many millions for tree buying in Yosemite, the Grand Teton-Jackson Hole country, Great Smokies, Acadia National Park and other areas as well, to persuade him to let the California Park Commission officially rename the Bull Creek stand The Rockefeller Redwood Forest.

Today the screens of big trees saved by the league line much of the Redwood Highway, making it one of the world’s inspiring scenic drives. But for the zeal of the Save-the-Redwoods League, it might have been a pavement running through 200 miles of desolation. Fortunately, the larger redwood companies played ball with us and kept their logging crews away from the highway until the league could raise money to buy the groves selected for purchase.

Saving the Big Trees in the Sierra Nevada was a more complicated task for several reasons. Some of these groves were privately owned, some were in national parks, a few in national forests. Though the giant redwoods made poor lumber, they always grew among stands of pines, firs and cedars coveted by the lumbering interests, and it was almost impossible to cut these trees without damaging the sequoias. Anyway, a Big Tree forest without pines, firs, cedars, and native shrubs all growing naturally and in a primitive state would not be worth saving. So everything had to be acquired.

Few Americans understand the peculiar status of their public domain. They assume that if timber is in the national forests, it is safe, but forget that the United States Forest Service is an agency charged by law to sell timber and to see that it is cut scientifically and profitably — except for occasional “primitive areas” which have been set aside to save primeval forest for inspirational and recreational uses. The conservation agency charged with protecting natural wonders, sublime scenery, and public forests unchanged for posterity is the National Park Service. One of the ironies of the situation is that millions of acres were allowed to slip from public ownership back in the ’80s and ’90s for less than two dollars an acre; today it is with difficulty that we buy the same tracts of timber back for $1,000 an acre, or even more. Many Big Tree groves were fraudulently filed upon in the easy-go days when the Federal Government was eager to settle the West fast. The giant sequoias almost always grow in or near damp glades, where their roots can pump up millions of gallons of water in the course of a year. In the spring and early summer, these glades are swampy. So many Big Trees were finagled into private hands under the infamous Swamp and Overflow Act — since repealed — which encouraged private enterprisers to drain swamps and turn them into productive farmlands.

Many were the wiles and stratagems of the timber hunters, as William B. Greeley, former head of the United States Forest Service, points out in his book, Forests and Men: “Agents of the General Land Office finally checked some S. and O. claims in California, whose swampy character seemed to coincide most strangely, 40 by 40, with choice stands of redwood timber. The locator had attested to the marshy nature of the ground by a sworn statement that he had crossed it in a bateau. What further proof could any reasonable official ask? His affidavit neglected to include a minor detail that the bateau was mounted on axles and wheels, and drawn across the sections of dry land by a yoke of oxen.”

Luckily, the first lumbermen who attempted to turn the Sequoia gigantea into boards found that they had tackled more than they could handle. The Big Trees were simply too huge, as became evident in a ghastly way in the Converse Grove on the western edge of Kings Canyon National Park. Here, 40 years after the lumbering was attempted, lay giant trunks scattered over an alpine basin, shattered into many pieces as they crashed to earth. The lumbermen departed, leaving the logs on the ground, after felling once-majestic trees that were giants when the Christian Era began.

After that debacle, the giant sequoia groves were safe from destruction for a time, for the selfish reason that it did not pay to make lumber of them. As John Muir, the implacable mountaineer, naturalist, and founder of the Sierra Club, once remarked, “No doubt these trees would make lumber after passing through a sawmill, just as George Washington, after passing through the hands of a French cook, would have made food.” Nevertheless, Big Trees are being lumbered this year in the Dillon Grove on the edge of Sequoia National Park, one tree having yielded over 7,000 grape stakes. Spurred by high prices, lumbermen are splitting the huge trunks with enormous wedges, driven by bulldozers, then hauling them off to the sawmills.

The first museum stand of these Big Trees earmarked for posterity was the Mariposa Grove, now in Yosemite National Park. It was ceded by Congress in 1864 to the state of California, becoming the first state park in the United States. It was returned to the Federal Government in 1906. Two landmarks in this grove — the Wawona Tree, so huge that sightseeing busses drive through it, and the Grizzly Giant — are rated by botanists as among the oldest living things on earth.

Sequoia National Park was created in 1890, specifically to save several fine Big Tree stands, but the superlative grove of the area, the Giant Forest, was already in private hands, as a result of a filing under the Swamp and Overflow Act. Almost half a century passed before the people got it back. By that time the Giant Forest was cluttered with shacks, an eyesore in one of Nature’s noblest temples. In 1915, Steve Mather obtained an option to buy the grove for $50,000. By the time Congress got around to appropriating the money, the option had expired and the owners were demanding $20,000 more. Fearful that the price would go still higher, Mather took his troubles to Pres. Gilbert Grosvenor and the trustees of the National Geographic Society, with the result that the society made available the funds to complete the purchase of this magnificent property. The General Sherman Tree, probably the largest in the world, is in the Giant Forest.

Mather made other purchases out of his own funds and with the aid of gifts from friends. Several of these deals took place concurrently with the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills scandals, which got Mather’s superior, Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall, into much trouble because he had accepted financial assistance from oilman Edward L. Doheny. Mather used to boast that he “took money from Doheny.” When pressed to explain what he did with the money, Mather always replied, “I bought Big Trees.” Mather, Doheny, Sen. W. F. Chandlery of Fresno, and George Eastman, the camera magnate, put up the cash to purchase the forests along the roads in Sequoia National Park.

By the time the National Park Service was created in 1916, logging railroads had pushed into the Yosemite National Park area, threatening devastation along all three approaches — the Wawona, the Big Oak Flat and the Coulterville roads. Mather, when he took over as director of the National Park Service, could foresee the day when travelers to Yosemite’s grandeur would have to motor more miles through devastated mountainside. Unable to persuade Congress to buy back the timber the Government’s land agents had virtually given to lumbering interests, Mather utilized authority granted in a 1912 Act of Congress and undertook to swap trees along the much-used Wawona road.

The plan was to trade the lumber companies out of screens of sugar pines, yellow pines, cedars, red, white, and Douglas firs by offering them other timber lands inside the park, in areas not visible from the roads. Although the lumber companies agreed in theory to the program, it wasn’t so easy to work out in practice. The loggers demanded bonuses for changing their operations, for moving their railroads and camps, for selective cutting within the park, and for going to the remote areas.

The screens of trees we wanted varied from 200 feet to half a mile in width, depending on the terrain and the view. We couldn’t have the strips too narrow or the timber might be blown down in violent storms; we didn’t want them too wide or the timber would cost too much. It took four years to work out the swaps to save some 10,000 acres of carefully chosen stands of trees. We gave the lumber companies a lot more than they gave us, but we got the Big Trees we wanted, all the way along a new mountain highway, then projected and since completed. The south entrance to the park was saved.

That left the north entrance, via Big Oak Flat, still in danger of devastation. Much of the mountainside outside the park was already cut over, and the loggers had left a scenic mess, if I ever saw one. Unfortunately, we didn’t have comparable timber to exchange on this side of the park, so the swapping idea was out. While working on this pressing problem, Director Mather’s health failed, and then it was up to me to save the timber along these two roads. I had to do it fast or the fine forests would be beyond salvation. The only way to preserve them was to buy the timber back at around five dollars per 1,000 board feet for trees, mostly sugar pine, that we could have bought for two dollars per 1,000 ten years before. It would take a lot of money — over $3,000,000 — to do the job. Even so, in retrospect it was a bargain; fine sugar pine today is worth $45 to $50 per 1,000.

First I talked with Rep. Louis Cramton, of Michigan, and with other congressional leaders who controlled the purse strings, and asked them if they would authorize the Secretary of the Interior to match, dollar for dollar, any money I could raise from private sources. This looked like a bargain to them, so they told me to go ahead. While I was wondering where to turn for money, Nicholas Roosevelt, New York Times writer and wilderness enthusiast, visited Yosemite National Park. He wandered afoot among the huge pine and fir forests, took pictures of the areas being devastated by the loggers, and reported what he had seen so graphically in the Times that it aroused John D. Rockefeller Jr. to quick action. He offered to match, dollar for dollar, whatever the Federal Government put up to buy the trees.

We had the money, but we still didn’t have the trees, because there were two big lumber interests involved, and they were hard traders. One was Jim Tyson, an old-time timber operator and as tough a dealer as I have ever encountered. The other, Alexander Fleming, was a benefactor of California Institute of Technology, who took the attitude that the more dollars he could extract from the Rockefellers, the more it meant for his favorite charity. Luckily, when he had just about bogged down and the fate of the trees was dismal indeed, the San Francisco bankers who had financed the lumbermen and who knew they were losing money at the time on their logging operations cracked down and forced them to accept our offer of $3,300,000 for 15,560 acres of timber. Mr. Rockefeller put up half and Congress voted the other half. Thus we were able to restore to Yosemite National Park much of the valuable land and timber lost in the earlier days.

Farther north are the Calaveras Big Tree Groves, majestic stands of giant sequoias, intermingled with tall and stately sugar and yellow pines, firs, and cedars. Although the Calaveras Groves were not designated park areas, we had planned to get these fine trees in public ownership since 1924, when Mather and I first went in on horseback to see them. Discovered by A.T. Dowd, a miner, in 1852, the Calaveras Big Trees were famous long before Yosemite’s Mariposa Grove and Sequoia’s Giant Forest were known.

The first reports of the gold seekers as to the size of the Calaveras trees were regarded as tall tales. To prove the reports true, five loggers spent 22 days felling one of the giants, after which they smoothed off the stump to make a dance floor twenty-five feet across. The bark from a section of this giant, thirty feet in length, was skinned off the log and sent to London, where a room was built of it in an effort to convince skeptics. Thus the North Calaveras Grove became one of the wonders of the world for early-day travelers to visit. It was made a state park in 1932.

What the thousands of visitors to this grove didn’t know was that a few miles distant, in the Stanislaus River watershed, was another stand of sequoias even more magnificent. This is the South Calaveras Grove, owned by the Pickering Lumber Company, of Kansas City. The South Grove was in no critical danger in 1924, when we visited it via foresters’ trails, so we concentrated our efforts on saving trees about to be felled. Today it is a different story. As a result of the postwar building boom and the increased demand for lumber, the loggers are on the very edge of the South Calaveras Grove. In fact, it is in deadly peril, and saving it is our major objective right now.

In the North Calaveras Grove deal, the Save-the-Redwoods League put up $72,000 and the Calaveras Grove Association raised $32,000. The state matched this money out of a $6,000,000 fund set aside several years ago to acquire sites for state parks. The South Calaveras Grove deal is even more involved. The standing timber has skyrocketed in value, and this means we have to raise millions where we used to raise hundreds of thousands. More than $2,000,000 in cash may be required, half of it to come from private donations, half from the state’s fund. The United States Forest Service is helping out by ceding to the state of California a strip of sugar-pine-and-fir acreage for a parkway between the two groves of sequoias. The Forest Service will also swap other timber for sugar pines owned by the private lumber interests lying immediately north of the South Grove. The sugar pine has been called “our most handsome tree” and “The Queen of the Sierras.”

The spectacular success of the Save-the-Redwoods League inspired similar tree-saving drives in other states. In fact, the movement gained such momentum that in 1921, Mather organized in Des Moines the National Conference on State Parks and set up a small division of the National Park Service to aid state park drives. He kicked off one of the first of these personally around a campfire on Mt. Rainier, where the Washington State Park plan was born in 1921. The Save-the-Trees drive in that state concentrated on the approaches to Mt. Rainier National Park, and on the Olympic National Park, in which thrives a unique rain forest of Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, Western red cedar, and hemlock, giants reaching 200 feet into the sky, with trunks 10 feet through. One Douglas fir in Olympic Park is over 17 feet through, and the largest Alaska cedar ever found, located in this park, is 20 feet in diameter. The annual rainfall of 140 inches a year accounts for the growth.

Usually these state drives gave birth to state parks, but occasionally to a national park. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park contains more than 500,000 acres, with upward of 200,000 acres covered with virgin forests consisting of 130 species of native trees, including many hardwoods. It was acquired with a $5,000,000 contribution from John D. Rockefeller Jr. in honor of his mother, Laura Spelman Rockefeller, matched by a similar sum from the states of North Carolina and Tennessee. This great park was officially dedicated in 1940.

Ten years later, Mr. Rockefeller saved an 1,100-acre tract of virgin Eastern forest on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. When our option on this tract, which also included the superb Linville Falls and Gorge, was about to expire without his offer to contribute one half the purchase price being matched, he wired me to acquire the property even if he had to meet the entire cost. He did and the sum was $95,000.

There are still notable stands of native trees in peril, and the danger is that with so much accomplished, the people will become complacent and say we have enough trees in public ownership. Idaho may have enough, Washington may have, and likewise Maine. But with our fast-increasing population, we need more public forests in more states. We don’t want to save all the redwoods, or all the sugar pines, or all the hardwoods. All we hope to do is to keep intact for as long as the trees live the finer groves in which public enjoyment outvalues manyfold the dollar earnings from harvesting timber.

]]>National Parks at 100http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/01/history/post-perspective/national-parks-100.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/01/history/post-perspective/national-parks-100.html#commentsWed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113802In what is arguably America’s best idea, vast tracts of land that could have been claimed, built up, exploited — maybe even ruined — were instead preserved and protected for the use of future generations.

]]>The long lonely call hung in the night, with notes from a musical scale known only to canines. The next morning, a ranger would tell me it was a coyote, but at that moment — and even now, remembering — I’d swear it was a wolf: one call, not many, and lower-pitched than the coyotes I’d heard before. The difference between a cello and a chorus of pennywhistles.

I was more than 2,000 miles into a 3,000-mile walk along the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, hiking from Mexico to Canada through five states, 25 national forests, and Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks. After more than four months, the routines of wilderness living — sleep eat walk eat walk eat sleep — were as comfortable as my broken-in boots; so were the daily chores of route finding, fording rivers, stepping around rattlesnakes, and hanging food in trees where bears presumably couldn’t requisition it. But the wildness of northern Wyoming was a different order of magnitude, and something had shifted inside me. For the first time, I was acutely aware of just how thin the nylon barrier was that separated me from whatever lurked outside.

The next morning, the ranger talked wildlife. Moose injured more tourists than bears, he said, and buffalo were dangerous, too. Visitors got gored, or stomped on: 1,500-pound animals with unpredictable temperaments made lousy selfie-plus-a-wild-beast subjects. As for bears: According to the National Park Service, between 1980 and 2014, there were 45 human injuries caused by grizzly bears in the backcountry, an average of one per year — which means, according to some statistical modeling magic, that the odds of a visitor being injured by a bear in Yellowstone are 1 in 2.2 million.

But statistics are only reassuring in theory. Back in reality, the trail I’d wanted to take was closed because a grizzly mom and cubs had been sighted in the area. A parallel trail was still open. I wondered aloud if the bears knew which trail was for them and which trail was for us. The ranger laughed and sat back looking unworried, but then he carried a gun. I carried a can of bear mace, holstered in a pouch attached to the hipbelt of my backpack. I considered just how fast I could pull it out, pop the safety, aim, and spray. Even if I were the fastest draw in the West, as a defense against the contiguous 48’s most fearsome predator, my weapon felt as insubstantial as the tent I’d lain awake in the night before.

The trail I’d wanted to take was closed because a grizzly mom and cubs had been sighted in the area.

I headed up the Snake River, presumably away from the mother bear. The trail loosely paralleled the Continental Divide through the remote southern borderlands of Yellowstone National Park. A bush shifted in the breeze — or was that a bear? A cloud made a shadow on a boulder — or maybe it was a bear cub? Ahead, a plume of smoke drifted lazily upward. A forest fire? Campsite? But no: It was a backcountry geyser basin spouting sulfurous steam; a faint odor of rotten egg hung in the air. You could believe the border between Earth and hell had broken open here, that the cauldrons of the underworld spewed their stinking concoctions into the clear mountain air. With my mind on grizzly bears, I’d completely forgotten where I was. There were no signs, no boardwalks, no warnings, no guardrails: I saw my first Yellowstone geyser much the same way John Colter, usually credited with being the first European to explore Yellowstone, might have seen it: as a complete surprise.

We have only handed-down hearsay for the details: Colter had earlier been a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which passed north of Yellowstone in 1806 but missed it entirely. A few months later, as the expedition was drawing to its close, Colter was honorably discharged in order to guide a trapping party back west toward the Upper Missouri. He spent the next four years exploring the northern Rockies, including the region we now know as Yellowstone. Colter was among that self-selected subset of people who think that walking across half a continent and back was a fine way to pass a year or two. When he finally returned east in 1810, he brought stories of adventures and close brushes with death. Audiences thrilled to his tale of Blackfoot Indians who killed Colter’s traveling companion and then stripped him naked and told him to run, telling him if they caught him, he would die. But Colter’s descriptions of the landscape were so over-the-top that they were greeted with skepticism and the mocking name “Colter’s Hell”; audiences were more apt to believe tales of Indian attacks than stories of gushing geysers and foaming fumaroles.

Steam engine:Yellowstone is home to half the world’s geysers. One of 500 in the park, Lone Star Geyser erupts every three hours. (Shutterstock)

Jim Bridger, who explored Yellowstone in the 1820s, fared no better where believability was concerned. In part, that was his own fault: His descriptions of waterfalls falling upward and “petrified trees with petrified birds singing petrified songs” were embellished — okay, slightly more than embellished. But there was truth at the core: What Bridger called a mountain of glass we now know as Obsidian Cliffs, and there is indeed a place where a fish can swim across the Continental Divide — I’ve seen it with my own eyes how the water of Two Ocean Creek runs down the Divide, slows at a saddle, then splits in half, although the only thing that crossed the divide when I was there was a little twig I had tossed in the water to see which ocean it would turn toward.

And so it went. The few people who made their way to remote northwestern Wyoming and returned with stories of geological oddities were roundly thought to be liars. Philadelphia’s Lippincott Magazine rejected one expedition’s story about Yellowstone, saying, “We don’t print fiction.”

And then, in the way of tectonic plates that rearrange themselves to create a new reality, the weight of evidence shifted. Finally, there were too many reports to ignore. Fact was, indeed, stranger than fiction: In a little-known corner of northwestern Wyoming, rivers boiled, mud pots bubbled, and geysers spouted, all in a mountain landscape rich with wildlife and forests.

Here’s the part I find remarkable: Those in the know — the explorers and surveyors and expedition members who were there first — the ones who could have claimed the land, built it up, maybe even ruined it, didn’t.

Instead, there was a consensus of sorts, so widespread that historians still argue whose idea it was, that Yellowstone should be protected for future generations. In 1872, it became the first national park. Not an amusement park. Not part of some commercial boondoggle. Simply a park, with essential services and infrastructure to handle visitors, and the goal of protecting the landscape, unspoiled and undeveloped, for the future. Over the next 44 years, another 34 national parks and monuments would be established and then gathered together into the National Park Service, established by an Act of Congress in 1916. Wallace Stegner called the national parks America’s “best idea,” one that inspired national park systems around the world. Today, 100 years later, America’s National Park Service manages more than 400 units ranging from caves to coral reefs to the St. Louis Gateway Arch to former Japanese internment camps to enormous country-sized swaths of Arctic wildlands — including examples of virtually every environment, ecosystem, and landform to be found in the country.

Into thin air: At 13,153 feet, Forester Pass in the Sierra Nevadas is the highest point on the Pacific Crest Trail. (Shutterstock)

I can’t think of a single thing in my daily routine that is the same as it would have been when the National Park Service was founded 100 years ago: I heat my house with oil, I make coffee in an electric espresso machine, I bank by computer, and I read books on a tablet. But the national parks seem to be places where time stands still: the ranger uniforms, the appropriately rustic buildings, the wooden signs; everything covered with park-service brown-and-green. And the backcountry, where hiking trails act as a sort of time machine, leading us to a world stripped to simple essentials. In modern life, we forget what it means to travel the way most of humanity did for almost all of history, at two or three miles an hour. We forget what a mile actually means. Walking into the backcountry of our national parks, we remember.

Consider this: In the High Sierra of California, following the Pacific Crest Trail across Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia national parks, you can hike a full 200 miles — the entire straight-line distance between Washington, D.C., and New York City, and considerably more than the distance between Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington — without seeing a single road, car, cell tower, fence, electric line, or human settlement.

It’s the oldest cliché in the book: largeness of landscape, smallness of human. But when you’re standing atop a high pass looking ahead to the prospect of walking some 500,000 steps, give or take, over mountains, feeling small isn’t so much a cliché as an acute realization of exactly how your all-too-human body measures up against an untamed landscape of high peaks and passes.

Going to Extremes

Facts and figures about our national parks

Oldest

Youngest

Yellowstone: 1864

Manhattan Project: 2015

Largest

Smallest

Wrangell-St. Elias: 13,005 square miles

Hot Springs: 8.7 square miles

Highest point

Lowest point

Denali: 20,320 feet

Death Valley: 270 feet below sea level

Hottest annual temperature

Coldest annual temperature (excluding Alaska)

Death Valley: 134 degrees at Furnace Creek

Yellowstone: 33 degrees

Most annual visitors

Fewest annual visitors

Great Smoky Mountains: 10 million

Gates of the Arctic: 13,700

So: Forester Pass on the border of Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, which, at 13,200 feet, is the highest point on the Pacific Crest Trail. Standing there (really, gasping for breath), I felt a curious mixture of superhuman strength (I’d climbed up here from down there, hadn’t I?) and heart-racing terror (between me and the next piece of pavement, I’d have to climb another five snow- and ice-covered passes, each between 10,000 and 13,000 feet). Below the pass, the mountain dropped away like a chute in one of those extreme-ski videos where a good run means cheating death. In July and August, the trail clings to the steep pitched wall via a corkscrew series of hairpin switchbacks, but I’d arrived in mid-June, and a blanket of snow still covered any slopes gentle enough to hold snow; on the steeper slopes, the rock was bare. Avalanches were a possibility. And if I fell — forget about calling for help. In this zero-bar zone, I’d be better off with carrier pigeons. The nearest road was at least two days’ walk away. I looped the ice ax strap around my wrist and gripped the adze. In the rest of the world, computers connected people and businesses, jet planes carried travelers across oceans, and bank transactions occurred at the speed of light. Here, atop the pass, it may as well have been the year 1868, when John Muir first came to these mountains.

I hasten to add that it’s not necessary to take your life in your hands to experience the High Sierra, or any other backcountry in any other national park. I’ve crossed these parks in July and in August, when the snow is down and the crowds are up, when it’s easier to put one foot in front of the other, not to mention safer. Either way, I marvel at the fact that in a world as protected and regimented as ours, our national parks and our wilderness areas make it possible, within a few hours’ drive of a major metropolis, to walk into a world of ice and snow and high mountains, where civilization is so far away that for all practical purposes — rescue, resupply, a hot bath, a Wi-Fi connection — it might as well not exist.

Nor do you have to sleep in a tent to get the full experience: an eyeful of more than you can possibly absorb. I remember my own first visit to Yosemite Valley, when I was young and jaded. I’d just gotten off another long hike in the high country, and I was taking a short detour by car into the Valley. I’d been overwhelmed in the high country; at every single step, you could trip and fall and your camera would shoot off a picture that could, today, make you an Instagram star. I didn’t expect to be overwhelmed on a busy road with cars and tourists and buildings. But then the road bent and the trees opened and I saw the view — that view — Ansel Adams’ view of El Capitan among the swirling black-and-white clouds, the view that each of Yosemite’s annual four million visitors gets to see smack as they enter the park. It stopped me in my tracks. I had to pull off the road for fear I’d wreck the car.

Which was pretty much the same reaction (minus the car) John Muir had when he arrived in Yosemite in 1868, four years after the federal government deeded Yosemite to the State of California for permanent protection. Muir had been peripatetic for a while; he’d explored the northern United States and Canada, then walked a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. He’d sailed to Cuba, hopped over to Panama, crossed the isthmus (there was no canal then), and caught a steamer to San Francisco, where he asked directions to “someplace wild.” That sent him 200 miles east on foot to the Sierra Nevada, where a rancher offered him a job as a sort of shepherd supervisor: He was to keep an eye on the guy who kept an eye on the sheep.

Muir fell in love with the land, and as lovers tend to, he spent those heady early days obsessing. He took notes on everything from the habits of marmots to the cycles of alpine flowers. He described glaciers and pine cones and the destructive grazing habits of the sheep (which he referred to as “hoofed locusts”). Arriving in Yosemite, he wrote, “Never before had I seen so glorious a landscape, so boundless an affluence of sublime mountain beauty.” Muir would travel widely for the rest of his life; he once wrote, “The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” But he would always return to the Sierra. It inspired not only his writing, but his activism: founding the Sierra Club, helping to establish Yosemite as well as Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon National Parks, and lobbying for the formation of the National Park Service.

My response to the same view was more ordinary: I took pictures and I drove to the main viewpoints, every inch a tourist. I did climb to the top of Yosemite Falls, where too much curiosity about what lies just over the edge can send you falling to your death. It’s a hike well worth the huffing and puffing. The view can make you understand how a landscape can be so powerful that you’d change your life to save it for the next generation.

The next generation needs it.

Desolate beauty: Petrified Forest National Park, one of the many sites championed for preservation by John Muir. (Shutterstock)

Years ago, I used to lead small groups of Washington, D.C., city kids into the wilds of Shenandoah National Park. We’d sleep in an Appalachian Trail shelter not more than a couple of miles’ walk from Skyline Drive, and the kids would marvel, and sometimes cower, at the great wilderness they thought they’d entered.

At night, the wind would send tree branches rattling against the corrugated iron roof, and deer would snort outside. It’s a startling sound, if you’ve never heard it, somewhere between a bark and a cough — less like Bambi, more like something that could eat you for dinner. The Shenandoah backcountry isn’t true wilderness, what with the highway and the resort and the restaurant and the parking areas and even the lean-tos themselves, but that didn’t matter: The definition of wilderness is very much in the eyes (in this case the ears) of the beholder. A perhaps apocryphal quote from early American settlers came to mind: “Wilderness is a dark and dismal place where all manner of wild beasts dash about uncooked.” I knew what the kids felt like. In Yellowstone, with the howling wolf and the unseen grizzly, I’d felt that way myself. Being in the wilderness makes you reexamine your place on the food chain — an unsettling feeling, even if the only thing outside your tent is a white-tailed deer.

The kids were usually sleepless the first night. By the second night, they were ready to collapse. Hiking in the woods for two days straight can have that effect. The kids learned to work the camping stoves, and we hiked around looking for animal tracks. I was just a hiking guide, not a social worker or a psychologist, but it seemed to me that some of these kids had tough lives back home, and that the outdoors acted as a gentle tonic. “I like it here. I have to breathe harder, but it feels like I can breathe better,” one of them told me. Which nicely sums it up.

In 1916, when Congress was considering the bill that would ultimately establish the U.S. National Park Service, the Post repeatedly showed its support. That year, a quick succession of editorials from Post editor George Horace Lorimer laid out his arguments for passage of the bill in the issues for January 1, February 12, and March 18.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/01/history/post-perspective/national-parks-100.html/feed2100 Years of the National Park Servicehttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/02/18/history/post-perspective/100-years-national-park-service.html
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 15:00:39 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113898This series offers perspectives on the history and importance of the National Park System.

]]>On August 25, 2016, the U.S. National Park Service celebrates its 100th anniversary. We all have our own, personal relationship with the national parks. For some, it’s a world of untouched, natural beauty; for others, it’s memories of fun vacations with family and friends. This series offers perspectives on the history and importance of the NPS.

In the feature story from our March/April 2016 issue, author and consummate hiker Karen Berger writes about the past, present, and future of America’s “best idea” as she describes her personal relationship with our national parks. Read more »

“America the Beautiful” is certainly an appropriate description. From the thundering power of the Niagara Falls, the panoramic splendor of the Grand Canyon, and the towering proportions of Mount McKinley, residents are surrounded by some of the most majestic places on Earth. But what about all the places in between? Read more »

Interview by Jeanne Wolf
Documentarian Ken Burns talks about what the national parks system means to him and what he hoped to accomplish with his 2009 documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.Read more »

From 1938 to 1941, the National Park Service employed WPA-FAP artists to create promotional posters for the parks. Only 14 designs were created before the project was suspended at the onset of World War II. Of the 14 produced, few survived. Read more »

From the Post Archive:

In 1954, Conrad Wirth, the director of the National Park Service, was responsible for 24 million acres of properties and the myriad troubles that came with them. Today, NPS sites cover an area larger than New Mexico, and the problems keep coming. Read more »

In 1950, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian warned the American people to keep an eye on the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Project, which proposed a dam that would cover most of Dinosaur National Monument. Read more »

Long before there was a National Park Service, Americans were traveling to the parks on horseback and in stagecoaches. After the railroads began building spur lines to the parks, they started advertising their park routes to Post readers. Read more »

The Post showed its support for the establishment of the National Park Service from day one. A January 1, 1916, editorial warns that not passing the National Park Service bill waiting before Congress would be a careless mistake. Read more »

The Post voiced support for the National Park Service bill again in February of 1916. Here, he argues that the wisdom of the plan to preserve these parks for future generations “is so self-evident that no room is left for argument.” Read more »

In March 1916, the Post drummed up more support for the creation of the NPS by tapping into readers’ sense of patriotism. The editorial compares America’s mismanaged national parks with the unified (and more popular) Canadian parks system. Read more »

]]>The Post and the Parkshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/02/18/history/post-perspective/post-parks.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/02/18/history/post-perspective/post-parks.html#commentsThu, 18 Feb 2016 15:00:20 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113686How legendary editor George Horace Lorimer made it his mission to create a National Park Service

The National Park Service was formed by an act of Congress on August 25, 1916. Prior to that, most of our national parks fell under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior (DOI), which was underfunded and responsible for eight different divisions that managed, among other things, patents, Indian affairs, education, railroads, and the census.

Some parks were staffed by the U.S. Army, which had to enforce laws against poaching, grazing, and vandalism. Other sites were managed by civilians. National monuments had minimal staffing. Historic battlefields were run by the U.S. War Department, whose interest in maintaining these sites was low on its list of priorities.

By 1916, thanks to the Model T, millions of Americans actually had the means to visit the parks. But the parks were poorly maintained — many had only rough dirt roads. At the core of the problem was a fragmented management system that couldn’t share resources or information from one park to the next. “The present situation is essentially that of a city with a dozen splendid but largely undeveloped parks, each of them under a separate management,” the Post commented in an editorial from February 1916. “Of course no city would tolerate any such absurd arrangement. It would immediately establish a park board or bureau to manage all the parks coordinately.”

One of the biggest challenges was a lack of agreement on whether conservation meant protecting park land for its wilderness or usable resources. The dispute came to national attention in 1913 when a valley in Yosemite Park was dammed to provide water supply for San Francisco. Fears that the parks’ resources would be squandered prompted the drive to unify the parks.

Post editor George Horace Lorimer was a fierce supporter of the National Park Service bill, which proposed a unified system to run all the nation’s parks and monuments from within the DOI. In the year before the bill was finally passed, he ran no fewer than seven editorials endorsing it, sometimes as frequently as two weeks apart. The Post’s nature writer, Emerson Hough, also wrote in support of conservation and the parks. And his “Made in America” series in 1915 promoted the parks to American travelers who wouldn’t be vacationing in war-torn Europe.

In the aftermath of the bill’s passage, many credited the Post for its drumbeat of support: As Richard B. Watrous, secretary of the American Civic Association, said in a statement before the House of Representatives after the bill’s passage in April of 1917, “I might cite The Saturday Evening Post, which has had an editorial in it every two or three weeks for the past three months by its managing editor, Mr. George Horace Lorimer in very marked approval of the idea of having a national park service.”

Click the blue headlines below to read three of those impassioned editorials:

In 1916, Post editor George Lorimer wasted no time voicing the magazine’s support for the formation of a National Park Service to unify and manage the nation’s four dozen or so parks and monuments, which at that time were maintained separately. The following editorial appeared in the Post on New Year’s Day of that year.

In February of 1916, Post editor George Lorimer showed his support once again for the passage of the National Park Service Organic Bill of 1916, which would establish the NPS as a bureau within the Department of the Interior. In “Parks for Posterity,” he argues that the “wisdom of this plan is so self-evident that no room is left for argument.”

In the Post of March 18, 1916, George Lorimer compared the success of Canada’s national park system to the relative failure of America’s parks, adding a note of patriotism to his arguments in support of the creation of the U.S. National Park Service. He contended that it wasn’t a question of quality, but of management.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/02/18/history/post-perspective/post-parks.html/feed1National Park Service — January 1, 1916http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/02/18/history/post-perspective/national-park-service-january-1-1916.html
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 14:55:50 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113673In 1916, Post editor George Lorimer wasted no time voicing the magazine’s support for the formation of a National Park Service to unify and manage the nation’s four dozen or so parks and monuments, which at that time were maintained separately. The following editorial appeared in the Post on New Year’s Day of that year. […]

]]>In 1916, Post editor George Lorimer wasted no time voicing the magazine’s support for the formation of a National Park Service to unify and manage the nation’s four dozen or so parks and monuments, which at that time were maintained separately. The following editorial appeared in the Post on New Year’s Day of that year.

National Park Service

A very simple bill to unify the management of the national parks will come before Congress this winter. It provides for a bureau in the Department of the Interior, in charge of a director who shall receive $6,000 a year, with such clerical, technical, and other assistance as the Secretary of the Interior deems necessary; and for an advisory board of three members, to serve without pay, on whom the director may call for engineering, landscaping, and like advice.

There are 12 national parks, besides some 30 national monuments. Each of them is appropriated for and managed separately. Something over a year ago, the superintendent of Yosemite Park was an army officer. A movement of troops ordered by the War Department would have taken him away, and there was nobody to take his place. An electric-power concern, with a concession in Sequoia Park, wished to make a change in its installation. Nobody in the Interior Department, 3,000 miles distant, knew whether this change ought to be permitted or not, nor was there an expert available to send there. Problems of engineering and of landscaping, the right solution of which requires the best expert advice, are continually arising in the various parks. It would be rather extravagant for any one park, operated as a separate unit, to maintain a staff adequate to deal with these problems, and under the present system, with each park appropriated for and managed separately, there can be little cooperation. But one staff under a unified management could serve all the parks.

President Taft, Secretary Fisher, and Secretary Lane heartily endorsed a unified park management such as this bill proposes to create, for the new bureau would have all the parks and monuments under its charge. The chief obstacle seems to have been merely congressional carelessness; but the national parks are too valuable a possession to be careless about. We trust the present Congress will see it that way.

Read more about how the Post showed continued support for the National Park Service through George Lorimer’s editorials in “The Post and the Parks.”

]]>Parks for Posterity — February 12, 1916http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/02/18/history/post-perspective/parks-posterity-february-12-1916.html
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 14:55:44 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113677In February of 1916, Post editor George Lorimer showed his support once again for the passage of the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916, which would establish the NPS as a bureau within the Department of the Interior. In the editorial “Parks for Posterity,” the author argues that the “wisdom of this plan is […]

]]>In February of 1916, Post editor George Lorimer showed his support once again for the passage of the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916, which would establish the NPS as a bureau within the Department of the Interior. In the editorial “Parks for Posterity,” the author argues that the “wisdom of this plan is so self-evident that no room is left for argument.”

Parks for Posterity

February 12, 1916

Yellowstone National Park (Library of Congress)

A prime object in establishing the National Parks was to preserve their scenic attractions for future generations. They have been managed pretty exclusively to that end. The scenery is all there for future generations to enjoy. But scenery does not wear out with use, like clothing. The big travel to the San Francisco Exposition was only one of many signs that this generation has a lively interest in it; and not even Yellowstone Park has been made as available for present inspection as it might have been.

The trouble is that the National Parks, properly speaking, have not been managed at all. There has been no proper machinery for managing them. Each has been treated as a separate thing. The broad problems that affect all of them pretty much alike have never been handled as a whole. No expert staff has ever been available to handle them. The bill now before Congress for a National Park Service would remedy this at an expense that is trifling in view of the importance of the parks. The present situation is essentially that of a city with a dozen splendid but largely undeveloped parks, each of them under a separate management, which had to wrestle with the problems of that particular park as best it could without reference to any of the others. Of course no city would tolerate any such absurd arrangement. It would immediately establish a park board or bureau to manage all the parks coordinately.

That is precisely what the National Park Service Bill proposes to accomplish for the National Parks. The wisdom of this plan is so self-evident that no room is left for argument; in fact, the obstacle is not based on argument. It is based merely on inertia. Presidents, Secretaries of the Interior, and virtually all those who have really examined the subject favor unified management. Congress has simply put it off.

Let Congress do it now.

Read more about how the Post showed continued support for the National Park Service through George Lorimer’s editorials in “The Post and the Parks.”

]]>National Park Service — March 18, 1916http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/02/18/history/post-perspective/national-park-service-march-18-1916.html
Thu, 18 Feb 2016 14:55:02 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113679In the Post of March 18, 1916, the Post compared the success of Canada’s national park system to the relative failure of America’s parks, adding a note of patriotism to the arguments in support of the creation of the U.S. National Park Service. The author contended that it wasn’t a question of quality, but of […]

]]>In the Post of March 18, 1916, the Post compared the success of Canada’s national park system to the relative failure of America’s parks, adding a note of patriotism to the arguments in support of the creation of the U.S. National Park Service. The author contended that it wasn’t a question of quality, but of management.

National Park Service

We are told on what we believe to be good authority that there were more visitors to the national parks of Canada in 1915 than to those of the United States. The reason is very simple. It is not at all that Canada’s national parks are superior to ours in natural attractions. It certainly is not that there was more travel to the western part of Canada last year than to our Pacific Coast. It is just because Canada manages her parks intelligently, and we do not. The Canadian parks are managed as a whole, by one bureau, which not only studies their needs as a unit but takes good care that information about them is put in the way of Canadian people.

Each of our 14 splendid national parks is managed separately, appropriated for separately. There is no single person or body to supervise all of them. Naturally they get developed, so far as they are developed at all, in a haphazard, spasmodic manner.

Four years ago President Taft said, in a message to Congress recommending unified park management, that only in the single case of the Yellowstone “have we made anything like adequate preparation for the use of a park by the public.” That observation is still true. Probably it will remain true until all the parks are put under one management — which virtually means that the magnificent scenery of the other parks will be mostly locked away and kept under cover. Properly developed and exploited, the parks should presently yield enough revenue to pay for their own upkeep.

A bill for unified park management is before the present Congress. There is no question that it ought to pass.

Read more about how the Post showed continued support for the National Park Service through George Lorimer’s editorials in “The Post and the Parks.”

]]>WPA Poster Project: Promoting Our Parkshttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/02/16/art-entertainment/parks-posters.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/02/16/art-entertainment/parks-posters.html#commentsTue, 16 Feb 2016 14:00:31 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=113958From 1938 to 1941, the National Park Service employed WPA-FAP artists to create silk-screen promotional posters for national parks. Only 14 designs were created before the project was suspended with the onset of World War II. Of the 14 parks posters produced, few survived

The Saturday Evening Post March/April 2016 cover features the beautiful Yellowstone National Park design. It is believed to be the work of C. Don Powell, chief designer for the WPA-FAP poster program, which was suspended at the start of World War II.

Created in the mid-1930s in response to the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and its Federal Art Project (FAP) employed more than 5,000 artists who created 225,000 works of art for the American people. From 1938 to 1941, the National Park Service employed WPA-FAP artists to create silk-screen promotional posters for national parks. Only 14 designs were created before the project was suspended with the onset of World War II. Of the 14 parks posters produced, few survived — until Doug Leen, a former park ranger, happened upon one at Grand Teton National Park in the early 1970s. Fascinated with the artwork and the history behind it, Leen embarked on a mission to find, restore, and eventually reproduce the vintage NPS posters. (For more on Leen and his quest, visit rangerdoug.com.) Just over 40 of these rare, original national park posters have since resurfaced and are now in National Park archives, the Library of Congress, and with private collectors.

The Artists

Relatively little is known about the individual artists who created the national park designs; the posters do not bear any artist’s signatures. Yet a National Park Service informational display produced in 1939 contains several photographs of one artist in particular, later identified as C. (Chester) Don Powell.

C. Don Powell

Born in 1896, Powell grew up in Kansas but studied art in Chicago where he also did commercial work for companies such as Wurlitzer. In 1927, Powell and his wife moved to San Francisco, where he set up a studio until the stock market crash of 1929. Out of work as an artist, he went to work for the WPA, first as a flagman on a road crew. But when his creative talents came to light, Powell was transferred to the National Park Service. Powell is believed to be the primary artist for the Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Zion serigraphs.

The poster project was closed down in 1941, with the onset of Word War II. When his assignment for NPS ended, Powell took a course in marine drafting and went to work as a modeler at Kaiser Shipyards in nearby Richmond, California. After World War II, Powell taught Adult Education courses in silk screening for Oakland City Schools and continued to pick up freelance jobs. His post-war work was mostly architectural — designing churches, schools, gymnasia, and houses — although he also did sign making, magazine and book illustration, set design, painting restoration, and commercial artwork. The last nine years of his life were spent as a draftsman with the 6th Army Engineers. He died virtually penniless in 1964 and is buried in Hayward, California.